Annals Of The Hive

Romney's Edge

2012-01-29T20:23:00.010-05:00

As Tuesday's Florida primary vote approaches, the argument about the roles Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney played in the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent devastation of the U.S. financial system has emerged as the central fight of the Florida campaign.  It's a fight Romney is winning.

Right now, Romney has an 11-point plus lead over Gingrich, and Florida voters, hit hard by the housing crisis, appear to have bought the Romney narrative that Gingrich enriched himself through consulting contracts with mortgage giant Freddie Mac, while Romney's involvement in the catastrophe was limited to holding the stock of a few companies that profited from the crash, e.g., Goldman Sachs, in a blind trust. And it turns out Gingrich even had some of the same investments. As a result, only 28 percent of likely Florida voters say they have a positive view of the consulting work Gingrich did for Freddie Mac, and a devastating 52 percent hold a negative view.

It's not surprising that Floridians believe Romney's charges against Gingrich, but can't quite follow the logic of Gingrich's charge that Romney is somehow part and parcel of the housing and financial crisis. It's not clear that Gingrich himself can explain exactly how Romney was involved in and profited from the disaster, though Romney continues to surround himself with Wall Street players who figured prominently in the housing bubble. He knows Romney was involved, because the Wall Street faction of the Republican establishment of which Romney is a member were all involved, but teasing out the Romney/Wall Street connection in 30-second commercials and debate arguments has been a challenge for Gingrich and his team.

On the other hand, connecting Gingrich to the housing scandal has been simple. Gingrich was hired to consult on ways to promote Freddie Mac by that corporation's chief lobbyist. If he didn't actually lobby himself, he told Freddie Mac how to successfully lobby the Congress, and he earned a fat fee for providing the advice.

The connection between Mitt Romney, the collapse of housing and the near collapse of America's financial system is not that clear. But Mitt Romney and the Republicans who have stood him up for President for the second time both enabled and benefited from the housing bubble and its collapse in ways Gingrich and Frank never did or could have done, and they will continue to benefit from it in the unlikely event that Mitt Romney ever becomes President.

Here are some key facts. For both of Romney's campaigns for President, his chief economic adviser and the staunchest defender of Romney's economic policies has been champion of Credit Default Swaps and dean of the Columbia Business School, Professor Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. And, the investments in Romney's "blind trust" include Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street bank Romney has a long relationship with that was at the red hot center of the financial meltdown. Through its employees, Goldman Sachs is a major contributor to the Romney campaign. In other words, Romney gets his economic views from an economist who was one of the architects of and apologists for Credit Default Swaps, the "invention" that made the housing bubble possible in the first place. And Romney has a long history of financial involvement with one of the manipulators who used Credit Default Swaps to bring the financial system down. No doubt those close relationships will continue if Romney moves into the oval office.

But to understand that by voting for Romney they are voting for more government by Wall Street, Florida voters would have to understand the roles Glenn Hubbard and Goldman Sachs played in the debacle that destroyed the value of their homes, and how complex derivatives like Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps work.

What makes Republican voters especially gullible is their belief that the Republican Party is the sole bastion of truth. One of Romney's most effective defenses has been to point out that the people exposing his scams have been liberals like Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job (2010), last year's winner of the Academy Award for best documentary film.  Republican voters are especially vulnerable to this dodge, since their party, though quick to blow the whistle on sexual peccadillos, is unlikely to blow the whistle on shady business deals. And the way the finance industry and the government of the United States, on purpose, wrecked the American economy and destroyed millions of lives is way beyond shady.

In a nutshell, the housing bubble was built on subprime mortages that were bundled as derivatives, called Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs for short -- and sold in unregulated markets along with Credit Default Swaps -- insurance policies that paid off when borrowers defaulted on the subprime loans in a CDO.  It was Credit Default Swaps that made investing in CDOs possible by spreading the risk. But, because anyone could buy a Credit Default Swap against a CDO, whether they owned the CDO or not, firms like Goldman Sachs could sell CDOs and bet against them at the same time, reaping enormous profits when borrowers defaulted. AIG, the main writer of Credit Default Swaps, collapsed -- and got bailed out by the American taxpayers -- when it couldn't pay off on the Credit Default Swaps it had written.   Financiers like Goldman Sachs held on to their profits, their commissions and the bonuses they made selling the CDOs and Credit Default Swaps, even after the bubble burst. The taxpayers held on to the dirty end of the stick, which appears to have been the plan all along. And, to lend an air of respectability to the scheme, academics like Glenn Hubbard covered up for the industry and even invented economic theories to justify and defend Credit Default Swaps.

This is Glenn Hubbard, Mitt Romney's chief economic advisor.

And here is Mitt Romney, putting in a plug for fellow financier Tim Geithner when Geithner was nominated for Secretary of Treasury by Obama.

Washington is a little world of its own. In the world of government and finance, there are players, and there are people like the Republican voters who favor Romney by 11 points who don't even know where the game is being played.

The real question is: Why hasn't Newt Gingrich found a way to enlighten them?

How Canadian Is This?

2011-11-15T09:37:00.002-05:00

The Canadian magazine publisher who kicked off Occupy Wall Street has decided it's time to declare victory and get out. Kalle Lasn told The Guardian he thinks the #Occupy movement should pack it in for the winter. Robert Mackey has an amusing summary of Lasn's ideas up at The Lede.

We declare “victory” and throw a party… a festival… a potlatch… a jubilee… a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad of projects ready to rumble next Spring.

We should have tried that in Vietnam.

I especially like the part about most of us going inside while the "die-hards" hold the fort. Those Canadian winters seem to have taken a toll on Mr. Lasn's gumption, to say nothing of his discretion.

An Accident Waiting To Happen

2011-10-12T06:44:00.003-04:00

It has to be frustrating for the conservative faction of the establishment that they haven't been able to field a right wing alternative to Obama. It's clear to everyone by now that the only real difference between Romney and Obama, on the domestic front at least, is that Romney would nudge America slightly to the right. That may be all the electorate is up for right now, but the conservative establishment would like to get the alternative of moving farther to the right in front of the voters. That's why there has been an insessant hunt for a viable Republican candidate to the right of Romney. The establishment needs a wrestler who can go into the ring with Obama, wearing right wing slogans on his cape.

To be sure, the conservative faction has gotten some mileage out of the preliminary contenders during the Republican debates. But if Romney goes on to face Obama, the memes scribbled on the contenders like -- to promote another sports simile -- logos on NASCAR cars will drop out of the news cycle. We are not likely to hear much about regressive taxes or shutting down government agencies, much less the idea of scrapping the New Deal and the Great Society. If those ideas can't make it through the Republican primary intact, they aren't likely to make it into the general election -- at least not as serious positions.

In spite of the fact that Romney is doing well in the Republican debates and polls -- and he picked up a big endorsement from Chris Christie yesterday -- I don't think he'll make it. The Republican establishment knows that a Romney/Obama race will come down to a personality contest. If they let Romney run, they will be pitting the least likable politician in the universe against the very likable Obama. Any message they hope to get across will be lost in a torrent of Romney words. "I'm still talking. I'm still talking," he told Perry last night. But is Romney saying anything Obama can't say better?

When the Romney campaign suddenly careens off the road again, ending up in the ditch, upside down, wheels spinning slower and slower until they stop, it will be important to understand why.

Committee To Elect Somebody Else (CESE)

2011-10-04T13:48:00.012-04:00

The establishment media's response to the lack of specific demands from the Occupy Wall Street protestors has been a rush to fill the void. If the protestors are unable or unwilling to say what they want, the media are ready to lend them some of their own pet demands, at no interest, which is just as well, since no one is that interested in the media's demands anyway.

I guess it's human nature to offer guesses and hints -- like helping a stammerer get the right word out -- when a dialogue falters. The trouble is, there's not much evidence that the protestors are trying to have a dialogue with anyone in the first place.

I figured before I tried to guess what it is the protestors want, I'd try to remember what it was I wanted way back in the Sixties, when I turned out to protest segregated lunch counters and movie theaters. Exactly what were my demands? What was it exactly I was trying to do?

I wasn't exactly at the red hot center of the Civil Rights Movement. Austin, Texas, was a hell of a long way from Birmingham. Sure there were some elbows thrown at us, even a pipe bomb -- unless it was just a cherry bomb -- maybe, but we weren't beat, sprayed with fire hose or bitten by dogs. Now and then a well-dressed blonde would spit on us or a state trooper would snap our picture with a polaroid and ask us how'd we feel if our mamas and daddies saw it, but I don't recall thinking I might get hurt. And yet, one by one the businesses along the drag in front of the University of Texas folded. And, when it was over, I felt like I'd got what I wanted.

It was a pretty simple protest, really. About a hundred of us would get in the ticket line and tell the cashier: "I'd like a ticket if everybody can have one." They'd say "sorry," and we'd go to the back of the line to try again. At the lunch counters we'd say: "I'd like to eat if everbody can."

When the time came that it looked like everybody could go to the movie and everybody could eat, I moved on to other things.

Apparently, I left some unfinished business behind.

So, being of the generation that left unfinished business behind, I'm not about to offer protestors ideas about how to make their protests more meaningful. I can't put into words what I think they must be feeling, anymore than I could have put into words what I was feeling fifty years ago.

But I do have an idea how to finish what I started back then. I call it the Committee To Elect Somebody Else (CESE). Way it works is you just vote against the person holding the office -- no matter who their opponent is -- until America becomes a better place to live. You give up the idea that your favorite politician can stay, but the other guy's has to go. You hang them all together.

That will be nasty tasting medicine for me to swallow if the Republican wing of the establishment nominates Mitt Romney, the least likeable politician of my lifetime, to run against Obama. I just hope I have the courage of my convictions if it comes to that.

The Culture Of Dissent

2011-10-01T11:53:00.001-04:00

Interesting to see the establishment media begin to cope with protests outside the political process they control. The venerable New York Times has an opinion piece up today, poking at the nascent movement. The writer reminds me of one of Kubrick's monkeys, working his courage up to touch the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Charles Blow's Hippies and Hipsters Exhale ranges from making fun of the Occupy Wall Street protest -- pointing out that the protestors amused themselves with face-painting and pillow fights -- to fretting about the idea that the protestors on Wall Street might represent the avante garde of a completely disillusioned American majority. Blow's "sage" advice to the protestors? Join the political process. Come be co-opted. Step right up.

Of course, Blow completely misses or chooses to ignore the point to protests like Occupy Wall Street -- fast becoming Occupy Your Street (Any Street) -- and October 2011, coming soon to Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. The protestors have rejected politics. They are wide awake. They no longer believe a political solution to America's problems is possible. They are determined to win or lose in the streets, and they are committed to the notion that culture trumps politics. (Think about the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war, anti-draft movement that ended the Vietnam War and the Johnson Presidency at the price of undermining The Great Society and opening the door of the Oval Office for Richard Nixon.) The way, we used to say, the cookie crumbles.

When I came home from the Army in the late Sixties, I spent a lot of time, lounging around and arguing with a good friend -- a Marcusian who had ditched his Swiss name for "Baptiste" -- about whether everything was politics -- his idea -- or everything was culture. I've never been more convinced I was right. Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counter Culture of the Sixties and Seventies -- precisely the culture Blow derides in the title of his essay.

The real question is: Can the emerging protest movements stay alive in the absence of something like the Counter Culture of the Sixties? Has enough work been done to build a culture of dissent to sustain them?

When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas, the UT School of Communication, together with Stanford University, hosted a week-long seminar every year at Pebble Beach. The schools brought a handful of graduate students and professors to Pebble Beach to spend a week with the leaders of the mainstream media. The kicker -- the brainchild of Stanley Donner -- was that the "leaders" who were invited to the seminars were the number two men and women of the broadcast industry, the men and women UT and Stanford figured had the best shot at grabbing power and doing something different when they did. The theory was that the last people in the world who would shake things up were the people in charge. If you wanted to talk to somebody in the industry about doing something better, the person you needed to get to was the heir apparent.

The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership -- to political office, you see -- have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment -- read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate -- idea will work its way into the political process. The culture just isn't there to sustain it.

They're Back!

2011-09-24T13:31:00.005-04:00

Remember these guys? They're the science ants who have been shooting particles down a tunnel that would be the envy of any hive in the world.

They're the physicists of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and they just sent some sub-atomic neutrinos, emanating from their particle accelerator outside Geneva, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy — a distance of 454 miles — at a speed about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam to travel the same distance. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 25 parts in a million.

Not much of a difference, but if the speed holds up, it will confine Einstein's theory of relativity to a world without neutrinos.

I've been expecting something like that to happen.

I went to an all boy Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, and thought I was getting a good education, until I competed to get into Rice University with kids who'd had a real education in math. There were questions on the exam I couldn't even read, let alone answer. And here's the deal. I went to that high school on a scholarship they gave to one incoming freshman every year -- the boy who had the highest score on a standard IQ test. So they knew something about my potential, but, in the 4 years I went to that Catholic high school, I wasn't offered one thing that enriched the curriculum. The only thing I got extra was a punch in the mouth if Istepped out of line. (Probably the only person in the world with as low an opinion of Catholic education as mine is Pierce Brosnan, who also went to a Christian Brothers school.)

When I started college, I was still struggling with math. I took Calculus three times. First time I made a C, so I took it over and made an F. Then I tried again, and finally settled for a D. (I gave my daughter a copy of that college transcript last year so she'll never have to worry about what I think about her math grades.)

I dropped out of school my senior year, bummed around until I got drafted, and spent some time in and out of the Army in Germany. Along the way, I met one of the most important people in my life, a guy named Joe Farina, who went through advanced training with me in San Antonio. Farina was working for Lockheed at NASA and doing a six-month hitch in the Reserves. At the end of our training, he went back to Houston and I shipped out for Germany. We corresponded while I was in the Army, and, when I returned to Galveston from Europe, we spent the summer hanging out at the beach and the Galvez Hotel pool. That summer, he taught me the fundamental concepts of math I should have learned when I was a kid.

Farina worked with a guy named George who had a theory about Einstein's equations I found fascinating. According to George, the reason those electrons couldn't go faster than the speed of light wasn't that they got denser the way Einstein said. It was because they started to wobble.

So I was thinking about George yesterday when I heard about those super-fast neutrinos. Thinking maybe those neutrinos fly straight. But mainly I was thinking about Joe Farina and about how in just a couple of months one guy could undo 4 years of harm caused by a bunch of incompetent educators. I owe him more than he will ever know.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)

2011-09-10T16:53:00.002-04:00

The tide of popular culture turns amazingly fast. The rise of one myth flows in over the ebb of another, wiping out all traces of the receding myth, until it returns to lap even farther up the beach than before. So it goes with pop culture versions of the fall of man. They keep coming back.

In the Fifties, the French writer Romain Gary raised the issue of mankind's survival in The Roots of Heaven. Gary's protagonist is Morel, an ordinary French dentist who goes over to the elephants in French Equatorial Africa. Morel is a misanthrope, but Gary, it turns out, is not. The ending of the novel is a moving tribute to the human spirit. The Fifties were the time of the beat generation, of cool, of jazz, grass, the Korean War, the rise and fall of McCarthy, the presidency of Eisenhower, the post-war boom, the poetry of Patchen and Ginsberg, the death of Robert Capa and the fall of Dien Bien Phu and Brown v. Board of Education.

Just seven years later, Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, contemplated the extinction of mankind and the rise of the ape as the torchbearer of civilization throughout the universe. The Sixties were the time of the hippies, the Cold War ascendent, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, acid and acid rock, the Vietnam War, the fall of Lyndon Johnson and the rise of Nixon. Alan Ginsberg lived to see Chicago cops riot against the sons and daughters of America's middle class who had tuned in, turned on, dropped out and come back swinging against the war and the draft. I was just back from Germany where I had put in my two years at an Army hospital, getting high and shooting up Thorazine to improve my tan, so I passed on Chicago myself, but I did show my younger brother how to curl up into a ball to protect his kidneys when the cops started beating him. I sent him off to Chicago with a bright red bandana to cover his nose and mouth when the tear gas began to fly.

Boulle's Planet of the Apes didn't speculate about the causes of the rise of the apes as the dominant species in the far reaches of the galaxy, or about the extinction of man and the rise of the apes on our own planet. Boulle simply presented the success of ape culture and the failure of mankind as a fact. For some unknown reason, man was just not good enough.

When Twentieth Century Fox produced the film version of Boulle's book, they apparently thought they owed the viewer an explanation. The plot of Planet of the Apes (1968) hangs on a malfunctioning starship that plunges back to Earth instead of landing on a planet at the far end of the galaxy, and on a nuclear war that wipes out the human race, letting apes take over the planet while the starship and its astronauts are gone.

In Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the human race is wiped out -- probably -- by a virus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody takes seriously the idea that man will be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. And we're not worried about rogue computers turning on the human race anymore. The peril now is biological. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus that makes apes smart enough to talk and to break out of an ape jail in San Francisco is deadly to humans and highly contagious to boot. Good thing for the apes, of course, since, without the intervention of the virus they would have had one good day of beating up on the cops before the bombs started to fall.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox

The idea that apes can beat up cops is as silly as the notion that hippies can beat up cops. It's just more Hollywood eyewash in the style of the Na'vi beating down the guns and machines of corporate America to liberate Pandora in Fox's Avatar (2009). But there is a strong odor of misanthropy and self-hatred about the idea that resonates with establishement critics like David Denby of The New Yorker.

Here's Denby, waxing poetic over scenes of apes, invading a research facility. "When the apes, like water bursting through a dam, pour through the building's glass walls at different levels," Denby exults, "the image is a pop epiphany of freedom."

Something like ice breaking up and cascading down a raging river as a metaphor for revolution, I suppose.

The high water mark is definitely creeping up the sand.

Missing Memes: The Establishment

2011-09-09T14:48:00.004-04:00

You don't have to believe in conspiracies to believe that America's government has fallen into the hands of powerful and wealthy interests like corporations, banks and labor unions. It's not even necessary to believe -- as simple-minded folks on both the left and the right fringes believe -- that the powerful interests that wag America are all of one mind. There is plenty of difference of opinion among the powerful -- the people we used to call the "Establishment." They disagree frequently, vehemently and publicly about the way they should exercise the power of the state on all kinds of issues, including the issue of what to do for and about the masses who are not part of the Establishment or even on the fringe of the Establishment. That would include the 14 million or so unemployed Americans, maybe double that number of underemployed Americans, and people who actually need Social Security and Medicare to live.

What the Establishment never disagrees about is that the government of the United States should represent their interests, and not the interests of the individuals who, taken together, make up the great mass of Americans who have been consigned to poverty, the "working" class, or the "middle" class. In other words, whatever else it may disagree about, the Establishment is in complete agreement that democracy should not be based on the will of "the people," i.e., the 218 million or so Americans of voting age, but on the will of the considerably smaller number of institutions who wield power in America. In their view, and in reality, the individual "atoms" of Lockean democracy have now coalesced around "super molecules" of emormous wealth and power -- super molecules that have mastered the trick of seizing power and using that power to gain even more power, until the only power left for the masses is the power of the masses to believe whichever lie they choose.

The Establishment's favorite lie -- and the one that appears to be its most successful one -- is that the power of government to affect the lives of people is limited, or that government is ineffectual. The truth, as the Establishment well knows, is that government is immensely powerful, and, in the right hands, capable of creating great fortunes.

Last night's Obama jobs speech is an amusing example of the Establishment at work. Already, it is being hailed as "aggressive" and "more than expected" by establishment pundits. We hear that the Obama plan, if enacted, might actually make a dent in the 9.2 percent official unemployment rate. A moments reflection reveals two things. First, the plan is actually designed to keep unemployment from getting worse, to keep more workers from joining the 14 million plus unemployed. Second, there is nothing about the plan that will change the landscape of political power by demonstrating that government itself can intervene directly in the economy -- as Franklin Roosevelt did during the Great Depression -- on behalf of the masses of unemployed and under-employed Americans who are suffering through the collapse of the world's financial system. Everything about the plan relies on programs and institutions that have already failed to restore America to that quaint condition that we used to call "full employment." The Establishment is not interested in full employment. It's only interested in keeping the lid on. And everything about the Obama plan is designed to do just that. The 14 million plus unemployed have been written off. Permanently.

How un-Rooseveltian Obama is has never been clearer than it was last night. (It's possible that Roosevelt was the last American president to actually represent the people who voted for him instead of the people who stood him up for office. Or was it Lyndon Johnson?) Three of the pillars of Obama's plan are simply to do more of the same: to extend unemployment insurance, to preserve vital state and local government jobs, and to cut the Social Security or payroll tax for businesses and employed workers. Only the last represents bucks that might increase aggregate demand, as opposed to keeping it from falling more, and the truth is workers are more likely to use the extra take-home pay to pay off debt than to buy more things and businesses are more likely to save the money than to use it to hire workers as long as they don't expect an increase in demand.

It's the fourth pillar, renewing America's infrastructure, thrown out as a good intention without a program or an agency to back it up, that really exposes the hand of the the Establishment in the Obama administration and in the Congress. It's the kind of idea Roosevelt would have backed up with a new agency, headed by a trusted friend like Harry Hopkins, and rammed through the Congress the Establishment gave him to work with. They've been pretty cautious about that kind of thing ever since. Obama's shown he can be trusted, but the "Republican" House of Representatives is there just in case who brung him to the dance slips his mind.

Missing Memes

2011-08-28T09:18:00.002-04:00

I can't remember the last time I heard a politician -- or a columnist for that matter -- mention the concept of "full employment." Getting to full employment -- an unemployment rate below 4% say -- would require massive intervention in the economy by the government. And the people who run this government -- and who will run the government that follows it -- have absolutely no intention of doing anything about the 16 million Americans who are now unemployed and under-employed. The truth is, we're moving on without them. They've been consigned to poverty and irrelevance. Pretty soon, they'll only come out at night.

"Full employment" has been dumped in the dust bin of missing memes, along with concepts like "the establishment", "the poor" and "class."

It's a matter of self-awareness as much as anything. Unless those 16 million unemployed and under-employed Americans become aware of themselves as a class and begin to act as a class, nothing very good is going to happen for them again -- ever.

But, to become self-aware, you have to own the right words. And people like me have deprived the permanently unemployed and under-employed of the words they need to become self-aware -- "poor", "class", and "full employment" -- in the same way we have deprived them of the proper words to describe the people like me, who have consigned them to poverty, i.e., "the establishment."

And In The Red Corner

2011-08-13T19:02:00.005-04:00

It's official. Rick Perry is in the race. Perry's entry into the Republican primary, long expected and made official today, is a significant event, because the Perry candidacy and the all but certain Perry v. Obama wrestling match next November, present voters with a real choice.

The choice, of course, is not between a liberal and a conservative, nor between a corporate candidate and a non-corporate candidate -- Perry, like Obama, will be a corporate candidate to some extent -- but a choice between undoing the New Deal gradually -- the Obama way -- and undoing it quick and dirty, all at once. The question voters may be asked to decide next year is whether to bring the New Deal to a gradual end under the moderate corporate governance of an Obama or a Romney, or to a screeching halt under a Rick Perry.

How much pain is corporate America willing to inflict on the poor, the uneducated and the permanently unemployed and underemployed? That question is not inconsequential. When it comes to pain, the pace of change is at least as important as its direction.

I think there is a very good chance America will opt for Perry.

It's not so much that Americans are hard-hearted as it is that they're worn out, tired of drifting and ready to accept the reality of two Americas. Permanent income inequality is acceptable, so-called full employment an idea that's seen its day. America I may be ready to elect a president that doesn't even give lip-service to the needs of America II.

As an alternative to the gradualism of Obama, Perry is perfect.

When I was last in Houston, Texas, I was cruising down one of the toll roads that circle and cross Houston, and I heard Kay Bailey Hutchison -- campaigning unsuccessfully to unseat Perry -- charge him with confiscating private land and turning it into toll roads. Perry was forced to back off on the toll roads, but he buried Hutchison in the Republican primary and went on to win another term as governor. I wonder if Hutchison even knew what hit her.

Nothing is more emblematic of America I than its toll roads.

The New World Order

2011-08-09T08:51:00.001-04:00

And I Didn't Hear A Single Groan

2011-07-12T17:37:00.000-04:00

"This recession has been hard on everybody."
Barack Obama 7/11/2011

The Film Doctor Is In

2011-06-18T20:47:00.044-04:00

Here is the main thing I want to say.
I'm working 24 hours a day.
I fix broken films.
You know I really can.

A long time ago, I figured out the only reason to create anything is no one else has. The books I want to write are the books I want to read, but nobody has written them yet. The films I want to make are the films I want to see, but nobody has made them yet.

My wife used to drive me crazy by starting to fix films the minute we left the theater. I don't think we've seen more than one or two films over the years she didn't have ideas about ways to make them better. I wrote it off to her politics. Well, hell, I'd say. Go make your own film if you don't like that one. Go make a film that fits your politics or your aesthetics or whatever.

Lately, I've come around to her way of thinking. Why not fix broken films? Why not start with the idea that what's missing in the world is a better version of a film somebody made or a book somebody wrote? Where does it say you have to start from scratch?

Now you take Passion Play (2010), a first film by screenwriter Mitch Glazer, for example. That's a gorgeous little film that never comes together. It has two pretty people: Mickey Rourke all broken down and Megan Fox, just coming into womanhood. It has Bill Murray, reprising the gangster he created for Mad Dog and Glory (1993), jazz, the desert, a freak show, LA, a woman with wings. What's not to like? The realization of the script for one thing. And, ironically, the script itself for another.

Rent the movie and come back. We're going to fix it by making it clear that for most of the movie Mickey is dying or dead, and that the entire film, from the moment that Mickey is improbably rescued by Native American sharpshooters, takes place on the plane between life and death.

As a comedy writer, Glazer has never had to trouble himself with thoughts about what is real and what is not. In fact, the unexpected is an essential element of comedy. But, in a movie that mixes comedy with surrealism, allegory and film noir, keeping things orderly -- keeping images, characters and events on their proper plane -- is what distinguishes the work of film makers like Fellini and Bergman from gutsy but unfinished efforts like Passion Play. The problem with Passion Play is that everything exists on the same plane. The viewer is forced to process everything in the movie -- winged women who learn to fly, broken down musicians, miraculous rescues by Native American warriors, ironic dialogue, cool humor, incongruous locations -- all on a plane that represents a gritty, slightly droll reality -- in spite of the fact that the beat up, beat down, booze and drug-whacked brain of the Mickey Rourke anti-hero who rescues the winged girl and, in turn, is rescued himself, though not redeemed, seems perfect for processing alternate realities.

The quick fix for Passion Play is simple. It all comes down to one shot. At the end of the film, Rourke is being transported in the arms of an angel. He looks down and, in a wide shot, sees his dead body, lying in a ravine and his murderer driving away. Glazer intends for us to realize at that moment that most of the film has been Rourke's experience of his transition from life to death -- a dying hallucination that calls to mind the last scenes of Terry Gilliam's brilliant Brazil (1985). What we need is a close shot of the body as Rourke leaves it behind to nail that moment of realization down in memory.

Passion Play (2010), Annapurna Productions and Rebecca Wang Entertainment

Glazer doesn't get close enough to Rourke's dead body to make that scene work. We need to see Rourke's dead face.

It would help to fade out on the Native Americans and fade in on Rourke, walking in the desert, to mark the transition to the dying hallucination earlier in the movie, too. And I'd cut the rest of the film in half. (The arbitrary length of "feature" films has done in more than one first film.)

I'd get Fox past the idea that she won't be taken seriously as an actress if she does nude scenes. I'm dying and I imagine Fox with her clothes on? Please.

A complete makeover of Glazer's beautiful but personal film would require too much work. The problem is that Rourke dies so early in the film that the revelation at the end of film that the action has taken place on some spiritual plane feels like a clever gimmick. Frankly, I'm not sure I care enough about the Rourke character for it to make a difference to me whether he's dead or not. And does it really matter if the film is taken literally or not? Would anyone care if Glazer left out the shot of Rourke's dead body altogether? Is Passion Play some kind of filmic Book Of The Dead, full of hidden images and code words scholars could spend years discovering?

It could be that the best news about Passion Play is that a film as personal and esoteric as Passion Play can even get produced.

Or maybe it's that Megan Fox can act. I have to wonder how smart Spielberg and Bay feel after seeing Fox in this little film.

Rule .303

2011-05-04T08:18:00.002-04:00

The Smoking Gun

2011-04-30T11:21:00.008-04:00

It's been interesting to watch the the smoking gun evolve into something like a slick, fact-based National Enquirer.

The history of the smoking gun is almost as entertaining as its exposés.

"The site, founded in April 1997 by William Bastone, Barbara Glauber, and Daniel Green," the about the smoking gun blurb tells us, "was acquired by Court TV in December 2000. The Smoking Gun is part of Turner Entertainment Digital Network, which is part of the Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital Network, itself a division of Time Warner, a media conglomerate headquartered above a mall in midtown Manhattan."

Who knew that the art of exposé could become a real sport? I guess Ted Turner knew.

While Progressive sites go after people like Trump with polemics and theories, Ted Turner goes after him with public documents.

The interesting question is why the mainstream media doesn't make this kind of FOIA request all the time.

Trump is beginning to look like a pathological liar. How could he not know that someone would check up on his story? So many rich kids dodged the draft one way or another during the Vietnam era that the fact that Trump did isn't that exciting. In those days, we'd have said anybody who could have gotten out of going to Vietnam and didn't was making a mistake. But to get caught lying about it?

This should be the end of Trump as a potential (for the third time now) presidential candidate. In the face of a lie, the defense that everybody did it won't hold up, even among the wingnuts.

Unless, of course, it turns out the documents are forged.

Ennui

2011-04-27T16:33:00.019-04:00

I've lost interest in the news. The world wide web in general has become a collossal bore. I was already starting to lose interest in the web sites I had developed the habit of visiting every day, when, suddenly, The New York Times fell apart. Following current events seems so meaningless now, even as a spectator sport. I feel like I'm bringing the plants and lawn furniture in for the winter, just when I should be putting them outside.

Spring has been a long time coming to the shores of Lake Michigan this year.

Following the YouTube links from It Might As Well Be Spring, I noticed that Dana Andrews was in the film. Andrews made some good films, including Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives. Sometimes I think my obsession with the auteur theory has caused me to underestimate the contribution actors make to films. Maybe they contribute more to the mise en scene than I've given them credit for. I've always thought Andrews would have made a great Phillip Marlowe.

As of this morning, there are 1,223 documentary films available to view instantly on Netflix (and many, many more available by mail.) I can't imagine being able to make a list of 1,223 things worth documenting, but I suppose it only took 1,223 people who were able to raise some cash to make a documentary to produce that body of work. Everybody does a little, nobody does a lot. The last documentary I watched was The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a strange little film I played out of curiosity about the similarities (and differences) between Ellsberg, who was on a first name basis with Henry Kissinger, and Private Bradley Manning.

(I sat in on a video conference with Marcy Wheeler, David House and Ann Wright at Firedoglake the other night. Made me aware of how raw sites like Firedoglake really are. To be truthful, there is an element of sour grapes in that comment, because at one time I had hoped Firedoglake would put one of my documentary film reviews on the front page once a month. I thought film reviews with a progressive slant might appeal to their readers, but I soon found out that front page reviews of films of all kinds are done by one of the publisher's pals. Anybody who can string four or five words together to make at least a semi-coherent sentence can get exposure and plenty of encouragement to publish for free at sites like Firedoglake. Getting paid and getting regular exposure on the front page are harder to do. On the other hand, at least they're scrapping.)

It turns out that the government is going to risk holding Private Manning in "medium security" at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while he awaits trial. The military has concluded that Manning is no longer a danger to himself or anyone else, and that he's not likely to be harmed by guards or other prisoners before he's tried. If the Obama administration is wrong about that, they will have a mess to clean up in the middle of a political campaign. Personally, I hope Manning is no longer in danger, because he's cut a deal and given the government Assange.

The first page of the Netflix documentary list includes Modify, an 84 minute film about "branding, piercing, tattooing, tongue splitting and every body modification imaginable." The blurb says Modify has "an original soundtrack featuring more than 20 new musical artists." Might be worth a look for somebody, though probably not for me. I couldn't even sit through Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS the last time I tried to watch it, and they don't even cut anyone for real.

Noir

2011-04-09T14:18:00.008-04:00

I woke up early and went down to the Corner Bakery for a cup of coffee. I sat at the window, next to a table of Russians. I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

I was watching the raindrops race each other down the window, the big ones gobbling up the little ones that got in their way, and thinking about Raymond Chandler and The Long Goodbye, a Chandler book I'd been reading the night before, when it hit me that The Long Goodbye is Chandler's most personal and autobiographical novel.

They say Chandler's agent was disappointed by The Long Goodbye. He thought the Phillip Marlowe character had gone soft. Personally, I think Marlowe comes across as more bitter and cynical than he is in Chandler's earlier work, and more political, more angry at the rich people who shaped the West Coast.

Some people say: When you dream, everything in the dream is you. I've never looked at novels and films that way, but maybe I should.

Chandler died in 1959. He developed pneumonia after a binge.

The chronology that accompanies The Library of America's Chandler (Stories and Early Novels), ends with: "1959 ... Returns alone to La Jolla where he intended to live. Drinks heavily, develops pneumonia, and is hospitalized on March 23. Dies in Scripps Clinic at 3:50 P.M. on March 26. Buried on March 30 at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego."

Robert Altman made a film version of The Long Goodbye in 1973. In a send-up of the detective genre, Altman cast Elliot Gould as a bumbling Phillip Marlowe who mumbles to himself and talks to his cat.

The thing about noir in books and films is there is never enough rain for me.

Maybe The Best Music Video Ever

2011-04-02T15:53:00.007-04:00

Old Billy's life is like the arc of this song. I figure I'm at the 2:45 mark -- then we do it again -- with plenty of energy left. I'm going to finish my life the way Mary J. Blige finishes this song, probably without the ads, the limousines or Bono kissing my hand.

The West Virginia Mine Wars

2011-03-11T09:13:00.019-05:00

The Republicans in Congress are trying to cut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities out of the federal budget, essentially eliminating all federal support for the arts, including support for documentary films. That's just one more way to stifle independent voices.

At a time when protests -- both non-violent and violent -- are sweeping the Middle East and Africa, and American unions -- supported by college students -- are struggling to fight off Republican attacks on the remnants of the labor movement, let's recall the kind of documentaries public money has helped produce.

Even the Heavens Weep: The West Virginia Mine Wars (1985), directed and edited by Danny L. McGuire, was produced by WPBY-TV and the West Virginia Educational Broadcasting Authority with money from The Humanities Foundation of West Virginia and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's a simple documentary -- narration, still photos and interviews -- that recreates the beginning of the labor movement in America, and the battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. It packs a surprising wallop.

In 1921, 10,000 armed coal miners -- many of them WWI vets -- marched up Blair Mountain to get at the coal mines and company towns on the other side of the mountain, triggering the bloodiest fight between labor and capital in America's history. The mine owners defended their mines and shanty towns with 3,000 hired thugs -- armed with rifles, machine guns and a small cannon -- dug in at the top of Blair Mountain, and hired private planes to bomb the miners with explosives and tear gas. Finally, Warren G. Harding sent federal troops to Blair Mountain to disarm both sides. Until the documentary was made in 1985, Blair Mountain had dropped out of American history.

Even the Heavens Weep, WV Educational Broadcasting Authority

Even the Heavens Weep is an important historical document, pulled together from archival photos and news clippings, framed by a good script. The photographs of the working conditions in coal mines before the unions and of the living conditions in the "company towns" at the West Virginia mines are, at the same time, a grim reminder of the past, and a horrifying glimpse into what the future of workers might look like in America, Inc.

Even the Heavens Weep is available from West Virginia Public Broadcasting in Charleston, West Virginia. For anyone interested in the labor movement and in understanding what that movement was originally about -- whether or not you know who John L. Lewis and Mother Jones are or where the name "redneck" came from -- it's more than worth the effort to get it.

It’s hard not to see similarities between the mine owners’ determination to smother the nascent union movement early in the 20th Century and corporate government’s determination to finish off the vestiges of the union movement now.

But it’s even harder not to see the differences. The early unions had the energy of youth and the excitement of their discovery of solidarity and brotherhood on their side, and the course of history was in their favor, even if it took ten more years, the Great Depression and the New Deal to establish the unions. (By the time Roosevelt threw the weight of the federal government behind the unions, every working man and woman in American would be hurting from the economic collapse that followed the drastic consolidation of wealth into hands of a few, privileged Americans that touched off the Great Depression.)

Nowadays, the union movement is on the wane. Fighting to protect public employee unions feels almost like fighting to protect an endangered species. Many Americans are hurting, and, in fact, will never work again. But there are too many Americans who are not hurting this time. The country and the economy is too big for 10,000 marchers to make a difference, even if they were armed — is that even conceivable anymore — and could find somebody to march against. It feels like the only thing left to document is the end of the labor movement in America. And maybe we won’t even bother to do that.

Films like Even the Heavens Weep don't cost a lot of money to make, but they do take time and dedication. And it takes backing to get the kind of interviews with historians McGuire uses to pull the archival footage and photos together. Without the mantle of the CPB, the NEA or the NEH, particularly for young film makers, getting access to credible sources can be extremely difficult --almost impossible -- to do.

Inside Job (2010) The First Day Of School

2011-02-28T09:52:00.001-05:00

Inside Job (2010), Charles Ferguson's exposé of the takeover of American government by greedy financiers, is full of information. It adds important details to the history of the worldwide financial disaster that triggered the Great Recession, and, even when Ferguson is being redundant, recounting facts that are generally well-known, he's entertaining. Sunday night, Ferguson won an Academy Award.

The question is: How relevant is the history of a ponzi scheme that caused a global financial disaster back in 2008, now that the folks Inside Job calls our "Wall Street government" have moved on to undermining civil liberties, torpedoing single-payer health insurance, busting unions and generally shredding the safety net we cobbled together during the Great Depression?

Inside Job (2010) Economic Crisis Film LLC

Will Charles Ferguson's documentary film bring down the Wall Street government? Will it even break their stride?

I have no doubt, that Inside Job will do what film and art are uniquely suited to do. It will change the way we look at the world. I don't think anyone who sees Inside Job will ever look at bankers and the finance industry, academia, our government, or the history of America over the last 30 years in the same way again.

Inside Job unfolds like a criminal trial, with Ferguson carefully building a case against the most prominent financial figures in America, many of whom are now in the Obama administration. By the end of the trial, the verdict of history -- or at least of the historian, Ferguson -- is clear. The finance industry and the government, on purpose, wrecked the world economy and destroyed millions of lives.

Ferguson's explanation of how subprime mortages were bundled as derivatives, called Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs for short -- and sold in unregulated markets along with Credit Default Swaps -- insurance policies that paid off when borrowers defaulted on the subprime loans in a CDO -- is easy to follow. Because anyone could buy a Credit Default Swap against a CDO, whether they owned the CDO or not, firms like Goldman Sachs could sell CDOs and bet against them at the same time. AIG, the main writer of Credit Default Swaps, collapsed -- and got bailed out -- when it couldn't pay off on the Credit Default Swaps it had written. The financiers held on to the commissions and bonuses they made selling the CDOs and Credit Default Swaps, even after the bubble burst. The taxpayers held on to the dirty end of the stick.

Ferguson is a skillfull interviewer who balances skepticism with naiveté and knows how to follow-up when he gets an opening. The big names in finance and government were smart to dodge his interviews. He is especially savage when he unmasks the academics -- the professors of economics and finance -- who sold out to the finance industry, covered up for crooks, and even invented economic theories to justify and defend Credit Default Swaps.

Inside Job is a film in the tradition of documentaries like Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly's Harvest of Shame (1960). It combines interviews and narration with archival video and photographs to make a point. It's not particularly filmic, but the cinematography of Svetlana Cvetko and Kalyanee Mam is crisp and sophisticated. It fits the subject. The settings for the interviews are well chosen. A fast-moving montage of mansions, yachts, jets, drugs and whores -- but where were the male prostitutes? -- adds a dimension to the history of the meltdown that was missing from the Congressional hearings on C-SPAN. To his credit, Ferguson sees Wall Street's obsession with wealth and its use of drugs and prostitutes more as character issues than as moral ones. And he's not without humor. The irony of Eliot Spitzer being reluctant to use the personal vices of Wall Street underlings to force them to flip on their overlords is not lost on him, or on us. Equally ironic is the Bush administration's sacrifice of Lehman Brothers to "calm the markets," like Greeks, sacrificing to Poseidon to calm the seas. If Inside Job has a weakness, it's in the way Ferguson brings the pain of the financial crisis down to the individual level. Why interview workers in China when so many workers in the Midwest had lost their jobs?

Inside Job won the Academy Award for Best Documentary this year, but, in spite of Matt Damon's sappy reminder -- delivered as we gaze at the Statue of Liberty -- that "some things are worth fighting for," Inside Job may not accomplish as much as Ferguson hopes.

What we -- the survivors -- need now, instead of warnings and history, are tools. We need to know how to get on down this Cormac McCarthy kind of road, past the charred, asphalt-covered bodies of the refugees who died when the death ray caught them pushing shopping carts, burdened with their last belongings, along the interstate. We need stuff we can use.
And we need to know what the overlords -- the financiers who are, as Ferguson reminds us, still in power -- are going to do next. What will they package and sell to create the next bubble? Maybe we can get in on the ground floor.

Inside Job (2010) will be available from Amazon and Netflix in March.

Gasland (2010) Dick Cheney's Legacy

2011-02-28T09:46:00.001-05:00

Every race has a dark horse, running at long odds. In this year's race for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, the dark horse may be GasLand (2010), a film by Josh Fox that takes on almost everyone in the Oil and Gas Industry, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton over the use of "fracking" -- hydraulic fracturing -- to extract natural gas from vast deposits all over the United States.

GasLand (2010) HBO Documentary Films Low Resolution Fair Use Video

While he was Vice President, Dick Cheney forced a bill through Congress that exempts fracking from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act. The drillers don't have to tell the public what's in the fracking liquid they mix with water and shoot into gas deposits where it can seep into the water supply or return to the surface, either to evaporate or to be carried off and dumped somewhere

Fox makes the case that fracking injects dangerous chemicals deep underground to break up rock and shale, releasing vast quantities of natural gas, while polluting the water supplies of homes and towns near the wells, which, if natural gas drilling proceeds as planned, will be just about every home and town in America. The industry denies the charge that fracking poisons the environment and the people and animals who depend on the environment for clean water.

Formally, GasLand is about as simple as documentary film gets. Maybe a Ken Burns special, cobbled together from old photos, with voice over and dramatic music, requires less of the film maker, but not much less. The subject of GasLand is Fox and his quest for information about what fracking is and what it is doing to people and the environment. We tag along, learning as we go. The form will be familiar to anyone who has seen Supersize Me (2004), Religulous (2008), or any of Michael Moore's films. GasLand adheres closely to the form. We take a road trip, talk to people who have had their water poisoned by the frackers, see some drinking water catching fire right out of the tap, animals losing their fur, sick people describing their symptoms, big names in the oil and gas industry, including Boone Pickens, refusing to be interviewed, politicians ducking and obfuscating.

Fox has a personal stake in the issue. He owns 14 acres of unspoiled land in Pennsylvania -- his boyhood home -- that the gas industry is trying to lease for $100,000. Fox doesn't try to make the industry's offer into a will he lease or won't he lease cliff hanger. We find out he won't early in the film. The element of suspense in GasLand is situational. The issue of fracking is far from settled. Legislation to undo Cheney's exemption of natural gas drilling from the reporting requirements of the Clean Air and Water Act is still working its way through Congress, and Pennsylvania and New York are struggling with the problem of how to protect their water supplies from the frackers. All of that counts in GasLand's favor. Timeliness is a plus for documentaries.

Fox is immensely likable. His rap is pleasant, his voice easy on the ears. Strangely enough -- and maybe it's the landscape he's traveling through -- he reminds me of Don Johnson in A Boy And His Dog (1975). That Fox is able to conjure up an apocalyptic premonition of the future, using video of natural gas drillers at work in people's backyards and tap water catching fire, is a sign of his considerable talent.

Nevertheless, GasLand is a dark horse in the Oscar sweepstakes, because it's ahead of its time. To work as exposé, it has to make fracking relevant and build some outrage against the natural gas industry. Two of its competitors, Inside Job (2010) and Restrepo (2010) just have to tap into the outrage over the global financial meltdown and the war in Afghanistan that already exists.

GasLand is available from Netflix and Amazon.

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Everybody Wins

2011-02-28T09:42:00.001-05:00

Whether or not Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary, British artist Banksy's light-hearted romp through the world of underground street art is shaping up as a win for Banksy, for his fellow street artists, and even for the collectors who, according to Banksy, bought $1 million worth of kitsch, conceived and produced with Banksy's help by the documentary film maker turned street artist: Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash." If the ebay value of the work the L.A. art geeks bought at Mr. Brainwash's massive 2008 Life Is Beautiful show is rising and falling with his fame, the geeks should be in better shape now than they were before Banksy released his chronicle of MBW's rise to stardom. MBW himself has made out quite well. In addition to the cash from his 2008 show, he landed a Madonna CD cover -- thereby meeting the minimum requirement for consideration as a serious graphic artist -- and he treated himself to a NYC show last year. But the biggest winner of all is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' mysterious "demopol", the nominating system that filled the Academy's hand in the category of Best Documentary by including Banksy's comedy among the five contenders.

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Trailer banksyfilms

As the voting draws to a close, Academy members can choose from a list of documentaries that includes exposés of the global financial system and the natural gas industry, a film portrait of a rifle platoon on the ground in Afghanistan, and, remarkably, two documentaries about artists and the impact art has on people's lives. One of them is Waste Land (2010), Lucy Walker's sensitive study of Brazilian-born artist Vik Munoz and the catadores who separate recyclables from garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho, the biggest landfill in the world. Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is the other one. It is, at the same time, an entertaining recollection and an "exposé" of the art scene. Lucy Walker had to walk a thin line between portraying her subjects and exploiting them. Banksy never had that problem. He just had to have fun.

Exploitation and expropriation is the main -- if not the only -- point to street art, formerly known as graffiti. The streets are the canvas, and, in Banksyland at night, they belong to art and to artists in search of a perfect wall. Exit Through The Gift Shop puts Banksy's permanent mark on street art and the L.A. art scene. It's a clever expropriation of underground street art and the artists who make it, especially Mr. Brainwash, who set out to document Banksy and got documented himself. The streets and street art belong to whomever can control them, and, in Exit Through the Gift Shop at least, Banksy is in full control.

Artists synthesize experience. The successful ones also manage to create self-sustaining systems in which the sale of their work fuels the creation of more work until the balance tips in their favor and they are making enough money to expand the scope of their work. They become a brand. Banksy, of course, is there. He's able to sustain his own work, run an art factory, finance the work of other artists, and move out into new forms. And, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Banksy has a flair for film.

Exit Through The Gift Shop is the most personal of the documentaries up for an Academy Award this year. It's cinema verité that is exceptionally well done, and it neatly demonstrates the power of narrative to structure time and to entertain.

Banksy has the conventions of the exposé film down pat: the hooded sweatshirt, the pixilated faces, the voice-over that ties fragments of film together. He understands the use of foreshadowing as well as he understands what Tom Wolfe called "le monde", the insular little world of art makers, art dealers and art collectors. The first time we meet Mr. Brainwash, he's pawning off cheap clothes with unusual stitching as expensive designer clothes. The last time we see him, he's just sold a million bucks worth of art that's as questionable, from Banksy's point of view, as the money Banksy forged -- with Princess Di's face in place of the Queen's -- but was afraid to distribute. There is no law against the sale of bad art. As Wolfe famously noticed, le monde is very small, and collectors have always been driven to get in on the ground floor, running the risk of buying bargain basement clothes at designer prices, or near art -- the equivalent of the peripheral junk you pick up when you exit a museum through the gift shop.

But it is the brilliance of his editing, the way he alters reality by juxtaposing events, sequencing and resequencing time and space to sculpt a reality that never was or could be in the so-called real world, that finally sets Banksy apart. Somehow, from fragments of experience, recorded on hundreds of tapes, Banksy pulls together a complete narrative that, really, could not be any other narrative and still fit together so well. What's real and what isn't? Does it matter? I doubt there are two viewers anywhere who would agree on how much of Banksy's documentary is "made up" to provide continuity and context, or just to make a point. (Personally, I doubt Mr. Brainwash's grilling at the hands of Disneyland security after Banksy -- in one of the film's funniest scenes -- inserts a life-size, blow-up doll, wearing a black hood and orange Gitmo jumpsuit, into the Disney landscape. But I enjoy the Disneyland footage anyway.)

If Exit Through The Gift Shop -- and Banksy's work in general -- has a weakness, it's that his work is political. Banksy has a message. It's a cool message, but a message nevertheless, and Banksy has to lock it down. He can't leave room for the viewer to miss the point. He can't chance the kind of complexity that would make his art polyreferential, the kind of work that points to a multitude of things at once. Maybe that kind of work -- work that empowers the viewer to participate more in making the art -- would require Banksy to give up more control of his turf than he's willing to do right now.

And, finally, there is this. The Life Is Beautiful show's success is all the more remarkable, because it occurs in 2008 when the American economy was already in free fall and the fault line, separating rich America and poor America -- a fissure conservatives had been hammering on since Reagan -- finally split, sending the two Americas drifting apart, though not so far apart that the poor Americans can't still see rich America and the American dream sailing away, forever out of reach. Will the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences be able to ignore that coincidence and judge Banksy's work on its artistic merits alone?

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) is available from Netflix and Amazon.

Waste Land (2010) Everybody Has To Serve Somebody

2011-02-28T09:40:00.002-05:00

Lucy Walker took some risks when she made Waste Land (2010). There were physical risks -- dengue fever and kidnapping -- and there were artistic risks, too, hazards in the landscape that could have tripped up an emerging talent, seriously damaging her reputation as a film maker. She had to make her way carefully, avoiding sentimentality on the one hand, cynicism and exploitation on the other. She played with scale, filming the landscape from a great distance, so that the catadores, working the garbage at Rio's Jardim Gramacho landfill, looked like ants, until, gradually, as she approached them, coming closer and closer, they were revealed as beautiful people. (But that could have gone the other way. Had she slipped, she might have filmed interesting patterns, moving across a colorful landscape, that, on close inspection, turned out to be grostesque. Walker had to trust her cinematographers -- Dudu Miranda, Heloisa Passos and Aaron Phillips -- and they delivered.)

Walker tried, unsuccessfully I think, to contrast the poverty of the catadores with the conspicuous wealth of Rio's south zone. Ironically, in a film that makes a point of the enormous gap, separating rich Brazilians from the poor catadores who dig through their waste for recyclables, the only rich people in the film are the artists and the collectors they serve. Waste Land starts out promisingly enough, with shots of Carnaval and a short montage that follows the custumes and other garbage from Carnaval as it's loaded into garbage trucks and hauled off to the landfill. But after that, to contrast rich and poor, Walker uses the artists, auctioneers and art collectors who move Vik Muniz's images of the catadores through le monde. That narrows the field considerably. (But don't you worry, Reader. Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010), another Oscar contender, has enough rich people to go around.)

In a blog she wrote while she was making the film, Walker distances herself from le monde. She says Muniz describes Rio as St. Tropez, surrounded by Mogadishu. The "garbage-clad open sewer" favela her catadores live in is the worst in town. The landfill is the place where "posh rubbish from the south zone mixes with the cheap trash from the favelas."

"Evenings we return to the south zone, she writes. I sulk as I head to a delicious dinner in a bulletproof car, I'd rather be with the catadores than these billionaires moaning about the price of contemporary art. These are the people who are going to buy the art work that Vik is making in the garbage at our charity auction at Phillips. And these are the people whose garbage will be part of the piece. We're going to trace all these comings-and-goings of things."

Does she? Well, not quite, but if you've been around le monde a little, you can fill in the blanks. I remember wandering around the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston one afternoon and coming across a cocktail party in the sculpture garden. I asked the guard, a tall woman in a dark, blue suit: "What are they celebrating?" "Being so rich, I guess," she said.

All right. There always has been tension between artists and the patrons they serve. Why go to the dinner parties? Better yet, why not go and take a camera along? Even a little Flip would do. Or, best of all, why not broaden the scope of the film and give us a look at the life-style of the fat cats who live in the south zone? All of them, not just the collectors of art.

Walker does step in a hole now and then.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, she comes through the Jardim Gramacho landfill and the making of Waste Land with her artistic limbs, her integrity, and her reputation intact. Lucy Walker is an increasingly important talent, and Waste Land is a timely and engrossing film.

Early in Waste Land, while Walker's crew is filming the catadores who separate recyclables from the garbage at Jardim Gramacho, a catador, noticing the cameras, calls out: "They're filming Animal Planet!" Walker includes the remark in the film to confront the issue of exploitation head on, but the catador could not have been more wrong. Nature films are pure direct cinema. Lions maul a baby elephant. The film makers don't interfere. They record the kill and move on. Walker is up to something else.

In a statement about Waste Land, Walker tells us documentary film makers can't help interfering with their subjects. "Your presence is changing everything," she says, "there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility." Walker tells us Waste Land, like all of her work, is about getting to know people who you do not normally meet in your life. She aims, she says, to create an opportunity for the audience to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. That's actually a pretty limited goal. In fact, she has done much more.

Walker and her collaborator, photographer Vik Muniz, have made a genuinely anti-Fascist film.

It is the intention of Fascist art, architecture and film to reduce individual human beings to insignificance, to make them feel small. (Visit the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., or watch Leni Riefenstahl's Fascist documentary Triumph Of The Will and you'll see what I mean.) Walker and Muniz have the opposite in mind. The footage of Vik Muniz, flying into Rio to make portraits of the catadores out of the recyclables they collect at Jardim Gramacho, is strikingly similar to Riefenstahl's footage of Adolf Hitler, flying into Nuremberg for the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. (The similarity could be a coincidence, but Walker is a student of film as well as a maker of films, and my guess is that she -- on some level -- made that connection.) The intention of the Riefenstahl film is the glorification of Hitler and the Fascist Third Reich, while the intention of Waste Land is homage to the little "guy," to the working poor. If anything is glorified in Waste Land, it is humanity.

Vik Muniz wanted to find out if he could change the lives of a group of people, using the same materials they dealt with every day. Muniz showed the catadores at Jardim Gramacho how to get big bucks for their recyclables by repackaging them as art. He put together a social experiment, and Waste Land documents that experiment. Unfortunately, the Pictures of Garbage (2008) series doesn't come through in the film. The process Muniz uses to create the work is complex and abstract. He photographs catadores, posing as figures in well-known works of art, La Mort de Marat, for example, then projects a giant image of the photographs on the floor. The catadores use recyclables to realize paintings -- collages really -- from the projected images, and Muniz photographs the catadores' "paintings" to make the final work of art. There are seven of them in the Pictures of Garbage series.

Tiao as Marat Muniz Studios

(Oddly enough, "Pictures of Garbage" -- as a title -- is most interesting in English, where it picks up some real complexity from the play on the word "garbage." The pictures are of people, not garbage. And the materials used to paint them aren't garbage either. They're recyclables. The recyclables are used to outline and shade -- you might say they are where the people are not -- so the people seem to emerge from the materials, from what Muniz calls: the "garbage." All of that nuance appears to be lost in Portugese. I checked around, and I hear Brazilians never use the word lixo to refer to people. Muniz is lucky to be working in the U.S.A., a mean country that has the idioms it needs to adequately express it's meanness.)

It doesn't matter. The Pictures of Garbage series isn't about art anyway. It's about action.

And, if Muniz's images don't come through, Walker's do. And, for me, they deliver what Walker promised, an opportunity to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. Walker makes that connection in an exceptionally filmic way. I want to show you a segment of the film. It's a little long, but for anyone who wants to understand what direct cinema can be in the hands of a gifted film maker, it's worth seeing.

The situation is this. When Walker started filming Waste Land, she met a catador, Valter dos Santos, riding his bicycle, and, Walker says, right then she knew she had a film. She describes Valter as the landfill's elder statesman, recycling guru and resident bard. He's been working at Jardim Gramacho for 26 years. "It's not bad to be poor," Valter teaches. "It's bad to be rich at the height of fame with your morals a dirty shame."

Vik Muniz doesn't make a portrait of Valter, and, while Vik and young Tiao dos Santos, the charismatic president of the pickers coop, are out on the art circuit, Valter is back at the landfill. Take a look.

Waste Land by Lucy Walker Almega Projects and O2 Films

That's how documentary film makers synthesize experience and make emotionally moving films. It's how a film maker like Lucy Walker can "just tell it like it is" and still take sides. (Walker dedicated Waste Land to Valter dos Santos.)

Look. We need more artists like Lucy Walker and Vik Muniz, artists who have the power to remind us of who we were, back when we had a sense of community.

And -- at the risk of sounding too nationalistic -- we need American film makers to give us a James Agee, Walker Evans look at America -- and, yes, a Lucy Walker look at America -- and at the sore -- to borrow a phrase from Agee -- the hard, flat, incurable sore of poverty that is spreading across America.

We need American film makers to point the steady, unafraid lenses of their cameras at the real face of America, and we need to have faith that something magnificent can come from the simple act of seeing one another as we really are.

After watching Waste Land, I realize that I have chosen not to see, too often I have chosen not to even look. I have chosen not to look, because, if I looked, I might have seen, and, seeing, I might have had to do something. I have chosen not to look, just as you, Reader, and you, Mr. President, and you Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen have chosen not to look. But my eyes are wide open now. Are yours? And don't you dare pretend that you're not reading this. -- Flame Off

Next week, Inside Job (2010).

This has been a good year for documentary film. The five documentaries the Academy's mysterious nominating system picked are so good that I honestly can't say which one I'd vote for. Fortunately, I don't have to vote. The Academy, in its infinite wisdom, has not given me a vote, just as the universe has not given the ostrich the power of flight.

Restrepo (2010)

2011-02-28T09:37:00.003-05:00

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As you zoom in, the arrow points to the opening of Afghanistan's Korengal Valley at the Pech River, northwest of Asadabad, near the Pakistan border. The Korengal valley is the location of what has been, arguably, the most documented engagement between U.S. forces and the local Taliban and their allied foreign fighters in Afghanistan. The fight for control of the Korengal Valley has been recorded in award-winning photographs, a long article in the New York Times Magazine, and, of particular interest, in Restrepo, a direct cinema film by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger that's available for sale or rental as a DVD and as streaming video from Netflix and Amazon. The film won an award at Sundance last year, and it's been nominated for an Academy Award. There is not a lot of direct cinema around anymore, and this one deals with a serious subject, with life and death decisions. On top of that, it must have been an exceptionally hard film to make.

The Hetherington-Junger documentary illustrates the difference between documentary film on the one hand and photographs and print on the other for practioners of the art and for viewers of documentary films as well. The challenges the film makers face in Restrepo are the same challenges direct cinema and cinéma vérité film makers always face: telling a story without narration, tying episodes together seamlessly, slapping on enough detail to make the film come to life and give viewers a sense of being there. In addition, they had to stay alive.

OP Restrepo as it appears in the film. Whoever shot this scene is outside the outpost, exposed to enemy fire. (Update: Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Misrata, Libya, 4/20/2011.)

The efforts of the film makers and the film's subjects, the professional soldiers of the Second Platoon of Battle Company, are exceptional, but, as film, Restrepo is not exceptional. As document, it fills some gaps that photography and print can't fill, and, for a few minutes, it achieves brilliance, but it relies too much on photography, print and a viewer's personal memories to fill the gaps in its incarnation as a 90-minute feature film.  I suspect there is an exceptional 30-minute film buried in Restrepo, but, if it's there, Junger and Hetherington didn't find it.

The experience of art is a collaboration between the artist and the audience, and fragmented videos like Restrepo require viewers to participate to an unusual extent. The more we know about combat, the more gaps we can fill and the more complete and convincing Restrepo seems, especially as we recall the film a couple of days later, after the images have sunk in.

Restrepo was brought to my attention by a Marine who thought it captured the essence of combat better than any film he'd seen. He and I are both aware of the movie's many shortcomings, its lack of a central theme beyond the notion that war is hell, its episodic and elliptical nature, the absence of a point-of-view that reveals what the GIs are shooting at -- we see bombs, rockets and mortars going off in the valley, but most of the time the soldiers could be firing their own weapons into thin air for all we know -- but, for him, the personalities of the soldiers make the film worthwhile. For me, it's the greasy grill in the snack bar, the cramped bunks, the mysterious spotting device that looks like it was covered up to keep us from seeing what it is. More cerebral than my Marine friend, I admire the idea of OP Restrepo, the gesture, while he admires the spirit of the men who manned the post.

For others, the appeal of Restrepo may lie in the irony of viewing a film about combat in the Korengal Valley, knowing that American troops withdrew from that valley in April of 2010, after entering it 5 years earlier specifically to pick a fight with the Taliban and the foreign fighters there.  America did not stay the course in the Korengal Valley. Some might say the soldiers and Marines who died there died in vain. And some might say that the valley is a metaphor for America's war in Afghanistan, a war that is sure to end in some kind of stalemate, with neither the United Nations nor the Taliban winning a clearcut victory.

Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were embedded with U.S. troops in the Korengal Valley off and on during 2007 and 2008.  Other reporters were there at the same time, notably, Elizabeth Rubin. Her story for the New York Times Magazine, Battle Company Is Out There, with photos by Lynsey Addario,  fills most of Restrepo's gaps. Indeed, Restrepo works best for me when I think of it as video that illustrates Rubin's article.

Restrepo The Movie, a web site devoted to promoting the film and Junger's book version of the fight for the Korengal Valley, War, has photos of the 2nd Platoon, video interviews, some outcuts from the film and some Hetherington pictures. A little blog at the site has an entry that reminds us that Juan Restrepo was a real person who died in combat and is remembered and mourned by his family.

Reading the Rubin article and spending some time at the Restrepo web site before you watch the film -- or reading Rubin and visiting the film's web site, then viewing the film again if you've already seen it -- may add to the depth of your viewing experience. It's something I'd recommend you do.

The web site tells us that Restrepo is "an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 90-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you." And, describing their film -- in all modesty I suppose, --- the directors themselves assure us that: "This is reality."

But the reality is that Junger and Hetherington's cameras do leave the valley. They go to Italy with Battle Company when the company redeploys, and the film makers take the soldiers of Battle Company into a studio and interview them there. Ironically, those interviews, those remembrances of combat, provide the glue that holds the video fragments Junger and Hetherington recorded on the ground in Afghanistan together. And it is the interviews that come just before some fragments of video shot in the middle of operation Rock Avalanche, a six-day fight around the village of Yaka China, that -- for a few minutes -- lift Restrepo to the level of brilliant documentary.

Like Junger's documentary book, A Perfect Storm, Junger and Hetherington's Restrepo is about death, even to the extent that, if nobody had been killed during the year they spent making the film, it's doubtful Restrepo would have been distributed.   But American soldiers did die in the Korengal Valley that year, and, as he did in A Perfect Storm, although he does not attend their deaths, Junger recreates their dying. To be sure, Junger does not presume to tell us how it feels to die in combat the way he told us how it feels to drown in A Perfect Storm. We learn from the soldiers that "Doc" Restrepo, the medic for whom outpost Restrepo and the film are named, was wounded soon after he arrived in the valley and bled to death in a medevac helicopter on the way to a field hospital. We're not there when Restrepo dies. But when another soldier, Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle, is killed, we're as close to the action and to the emotions of his comrades as it's possible to get without being there.

There is something uncomfortable -- disrespectful maybe --about deconstructing a film that shows an American soldier dying in a war that is, for some of us, morally, strategically and even tactically ambiguous.  After five years of fighting for the valley, the battleground turned out to be of no strategic value. The tactic of seizing the high ground and setting up an outpost -- OP Restrepo -- to draw the enemy in did not work.  The attack on the outpost never came, and Battle Company's CO, Dan Kearney, was forced to take his soldiers down the valley to engage the Taliban in Operation Rock Avalanche, a long battle that is the climax of the film and the low point of Battle Company's deployment in the Korangel Valley.

Veteran combat photographers used to advise rookies to use fast film, a fast shutter, stop down, focus at 10 meters and shoot anything that moves. That works to illustrate a story, but to tell a story with pictures, especially one that unfolds over months of fighting, much of it at night, needs a better plan.

Elizabeth Rubin says she went to Afghanistan with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes?   After a few days, that question sparked others. Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? Why were more American troops being killed every year?

Those questions led Rubin to focus her article on the life and death decisions being made every day in the Korengal Valley and on the man making most of them:  Dan Kearney, the lord of the Korengal Valley. She follows Kearney through a fire fight that ends with him killing a woman and a child when he destroys a house with armor-piercing missiles, and on into Operation Rock Avalanche, a mission Rubin says many thought insane. It's during Rock Avalanche that Rubin's rendition of the battle for the Korengal Valley syncs up with Junger's and Hetherington's in her account of the action that cost Staff Sergeant Rougle his life.

I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice was shot in the stomach. A soldier was using the heating chemicals from a Meal Ready to Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going into shock.

Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to pieces. He worshiped Rougle. “Sergeant Rougle is dying. It’s my fault. . . . I’m sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . .” Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.

“There’s nothing you could do,” Piosa said, grabbing Clinard’s shoulder. “You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac.” Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the trees.

It may be that some day someone like Sebastian Junger or Elizabeth Rubin will write a book, and the electronic version of that book will include hyperlinks to video clips that illustrate the author's prose. The words and images and sounds will all come together in the same work -- a new kind of art that combines the best of narrative, video, photography and sound.

Or maybe we'll have to keep pulling that kind of work together ourselves, creating cathedrals of our own imagining like my recollection of Restrepo, with chapels by Rubin and Junger, stained glass windows by Hetherington and Addario, statues of Restrepo, Rougle, Kearney and Sal Giunta, the first living Medal of Honor recipient since the Vietnam War, clips from YouTube put up there by GIs -- and, high up on a back roof, a little gargoyle fashioned from these thoughts.

Restrepo is available from Netflix and Amazon.

Madison Avenue

2011-02-28T09:22:00.000-05:00

Madison Avenue hacks have been ripping off talented artists since the early days of advertising, but the rip offs seem to get worse every year.

The people producing ads these days don't have the art historical references to understand the work they're ripping off. Their knock offs aren't just unoriginal. They're bad.

The latest example is an AT&T rip off of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The producer probably saw an article about Christo and Jeanne-Claude somewhere -- though I doubt he or she ever actually saw a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project -- and figured it would be a good idea to make a visual pun on the word "cover" by showing buildings and other landmarks being draped in colored cloth.

This pretentious commercial, the latest in AT&T's ongoing "coverage" war with Verizon, is a good example of how mangled art turns up in advertising, and it could have some unintended consequences for AT&T. That's what they get. As every school child knows, you're not supposed to "touch the art." If AT&T rethinks anything, they should rethink this ad, before Verizon jumps on it with an ad that takes the wraps off.

I see people working in an office with big windows and a fantastic view. Some of them are talking on their cell phones. Suddenly, their windows are covered by falling drapes, the room gets dark and the cell phones stop working. We see AT&T covering buildings, cities, a beach. Everything stops until Verizon starts tearing down the drapes, uncovering buildings, rolling up the fabric covering the beach. The cell phones start working again.

Here's a real Christo and Jeanne-Claude project from the Sixties. A wrapped beach in Australia.

If the ad person who produced the AT&T ad had actually experienced a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project, he or she might have realized that wrapping an object confines it, hides it, interferes with it, shuts it up and closes it in. Something wrapped is limited by the wrapping. It's the unwrapping that's the significant event.

Christo's Valley Curtain at Rifle Gap, Colorado. The size and shape of the "waves" are based on Coast Guard research and designed to evoke feelings of dread.

AT&T has had to remake their commercial and add a disclaimer, saying that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have nothing to do with AT&T. One more obnoxious commercial like this one and I'll join them.

Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling

2011-02-28T09:18:00.000-05:00

Kathyrn Bigelow is about to become the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Whether she deserves the Best Director prize -- and I happen to think she does -- is beside the point. Ms. Bigelow will come away with the Oscar for Best Director as a consolation prize, because the Academy can't afford to admit that The Hurt Locker was the best picture of the year.

The Hurt Locker is up against Hollywood's real glass ceiling: the industry's profit margin.

Can Hollywood acknowledge that a low-budget movie that has grossed less than $20 million is a better film than the box office event Avatar that has grossed over $1 billion and is on its way to becoming one of the most profitable films of all time? Can the industry tell moviegoers: Thanks for the bucks, but the 3D spectacle you blew your money on last Christmas wasn't a great movie after all?

The face-off between The Hurt Locker and Avatar has been billed as woman against man, ex-wife against ex-husband, blockbuster against art house breakout. But, in the most basic sense, the confrontation looming at the Academy Awards is about whether movies can come to grips with the human condition instead of trying to escape from it.

Can we afford to make movies that synthesize real experience, to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists, or can we only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world?

Rejecting The Hurt Locker will be a clear statement that Hollywood doesn't have the heart to take on the real world. In the head-to-head match-up between The Hurt Locker and Avatar, there is no question that The Hurt Locker is the better film.

Avatar is a significant motion picture event, designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release has been accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. It’s probably the first of many 3D blockbusters Hollywood will crank out over the next couple of years, and, in that sense at least, it represents the future of the industry.

Unfortunately, Avatar is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. Worst of all, the film consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, Avatar is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves. Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless.

There is more real meaning in any single scene of The Hurt Locker than there is in all of Avatar.

Ms. Bigelow's film conveys both the incredible pressure American troops in Iraq have been under to make instant life-and-death decisions and the limits of high-tech to take the pressure off of them. As she develops the film's premise that war is addictive, it doesn't take us long to discover it's not just Sgt. James who's addicted to war, it's America itself that's addicted as well. In James' case, it's an addiction that craves the unmediated experience of danger. He disarms bombs with his own hands. But it's an addiction that's tempered by James' and his team's regard for human life.

Ms. Bigelow's GIs are reluctant killers who risk their own lives to save the lives of others. Somehow, as we watch James' teammate, Specialist Eldridge, struggle to engage the enemy, Ms. Bigelow leads us to the realization that we are all Specialists now.

Critics of the Iraq occupation will find no cheap shots at America or the American military in The Hurt Locker. Ms. Bigelow invites us to see the war from the point of view of our best kind of soldier -- one whose job is to save lives, not take them.

That one of them is unable to find his way home, that by the end of the film all he wants is another moonwalk down a deserted Baghdad street in search of another bomb, says something important, though disturbing, about what it means to be a human being -- or a nation -- at war.

Nevertheless, Hollywood will split the Oscars between Ms. Bigelow and Mr. Cameron. Ms. Bigelow will win the Best Director Oscar, but the Best Picture award will go to Avatar. That's the bottom line.

Lady Macbeth In Iraq

2011-02-28T09:12:00.002-05:00

Bring forth men-children only, for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males. -- Macbeth

Why do women tear other women down? I ran across this hatchet job on Kathryn Bigelow by film critic Martha Nochimson at Salon this morning.

Nochimson's attack is personal, and, in a nutshell, boils down to the charge that Bigelow ditched her femininity to succeed in a man's world. A lesser included offense is the rather strange charge that Bigelow's Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker is less manly than -- of all people -- John Wayne, who consistently glorified war, but whom Nochimson characterizes as a "meaningful mentor" to young men.

There has always been tension between creative people like Bigelow and the critics who crash their parties, but this "criticism" -- which reminds me of the gender issues raised around exceptional female atheletes -- is less an example of second-rate criticism than an example of the way women tear each other down. While Bigelow is trying to crash through Hollywood's glass ceiling, Nochimson is hanging onto her legs. When will women stop acting like crabs in a basket, crawling over one another to get out?

Make no mistake about it, Nochimson's article is not about The Hurt Locker. It's about Bigelow and the kind of woman she is.

Bigelow deserves and will get the Best Director Oscar for her work on The Hurt Locker. Her film conveys both the incredible pressure American troops in Iraq have been under to make instant life-and-death decisions and the limits of high-tech to take the pressure off of them. As she develops the film's premise, that something about war is addictive, we realize it's not just Sgt. James who's addicted. All of us are. In Sgt. James' case, it's the unmediated experience of danger that's addictive. He disarms bombs with his own hands. For the rest of us, it's war as the central reality of our time.

That Sgt. James is unable to find his way home, that by the end of the film all he wants is another moonwalk down a deserted Baghdad street in search of another bomb, says something important, though disturbing, about what it means to be a human being -- or a nation -- at war.

Ms. Nochimson should watch The Hurt Locker standing up next time. Clearly, most of it went over her head. And she should give up criticizing films until she learns what irony and metaphor are for.

The Hurt Locker May Have A Chance After All

2011-02-28T08:44:00.005-05:00

(AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Just when I thought Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker didn't have a chance to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the AP reports that some pesky Palestinians have decided to get into the act. Palestinian protesters at Bilin have painted themselves blue and posed as characters from Avatar. Apparently, the demonstrators equate their fight at Bilin to the Na'vi's fight against intergalactic corporatism in Cameron's film.

With the Best Director Oscar already in the bag for Bigelow, Cameron now finds his Best Picture Oscar in jeopardy. Hollywood needs 3D, but do they need it enough to associate themselves with a film that's been picked up on by those controversial Palestinians?

Could be a sweep for Bigelow.

Avatar: Cameron's Epic Failure

2011-02-13T10:15:00.001-05:00

Be sure you see the 3D version of James Cameron's Avatar (2009). The 3D visuals are the only thing Avatar has going for it. Without them, it's a second-rate effort with a hackneyed plot and dialogue from a director who seems to have entered his long fingernails phase. Cameron spent so much time making Avatar that the world moved on, leaving him to obsess over yesterday's themes alone.

While Avatar, like American banks, is probably too big to fail, it will be interesting to see if America embraces Avatar the way it did Cameron's most important film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), or Michael Bay's excellent summer blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).

It was Cameron's genius to create a myth in T2 that resolved the conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg. In his Transformers films, Bay goes beyond the man vs. machine myth to pursue a vision of machines transcendent. Bay's machines embody the best and the worst of human nature. In Avatar, Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it. While Bay celebrates the kickass technology of the U.S. military and its projection of power anywhere at any time, Cameron comes down on the side of the men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations -- a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in Aliens (1986) and in The Abyss (1989), although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, The Mission (1986) . They still don't.

Avatar has too many film-historical references to be considered original art. The warmed-over plot and characters will appeal to viewers who think of the Battle Of Little Big Horn as the highpoint of the westward expansion or of Dances With Wolves as a good film. The rest of us will have to wait for a new director with fresh ideas to exploit the 3D technology Cameron has pursued so faithfully and so completely frittered away.

What's Wrong With Avatar?

2011-02-13T10:13:00.001-05:00

James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is a significant motion picture event, designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release has been accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. It’s probably the first of many 3D blockbusters Hollywood will crank out over the next couple of years, and, in that sense at least, it represents the future of the industry. Unfortunately, it’s a bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. Worst of all, the film consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. James Cameron of all people should know better.

One of the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us is through myths. In the telling and re-telling of myths, we attempt to resolve conflicts between concepts like human and machine, life and death, and good and evil by reconciling and uniting the opposing concepts within the fabric of the myth. The struggle of human against machine, which had been the subject of myth since the Industrial Revolution, came close to being resolved by the Science Fiction genre's myth of The Cyborg, a creation that is part human and part machine. The myth of The Cyborg unites human and machine, or, more precisely, it re-unites humans with characteristics we projected onto the world of machines and set ourselves in opposition to. Machines are cold, dead and hard, but living human beings are warm and, compared to machines, very soft. The fragility of human beings is revealed in war, murders, car wrecks and plane crashes, the art of Schwarzkogler, Burden and Mark Pauline, the reproductions of Andy Warhol, and the films of motion picture directors whose forte is the action sequence, and, piling action sequence upon action sequence and genre upon genre, the Action Adventure Science Fiction Fantasy film.

It happens that two of the best known and most successful renditions of the myth of The Cyborg are Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). What is particularly interesting about T2 is that it marked a significant shift in our attitudes toward machines. In 1984, The Terminator still reflects the ambivalence and caution that had characterized our attitudes toward machines for hundreds of years and informed the Science Fiction genre film since Fritz Lang created the evil robot, Maria (the original material girl), in Metropolis (1926). In 1991, just seven years after The Terminator, Cameron and Hurd's Terminator 2: Judgment Day creates a world in which an out of control machine with an Austrian accent saves the human race. If we didn’t notice anything strange about this particular rendering of the human versus machine myth, it's because we had already made the mental leap to the other side of the chasm separating men and women from machines. After struggling with the issue for a few hundred years, we had finally made up our minds about computers, robots and ourselves, and we had decided to come down on the side of the machines.

The distinction between humans and machines began to blur in the 1980’s. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), more physical damage is sustained by replicants than by people, the replicants have pitifully short life spans, and, in fact, all of the women in the film are replicants. In Robocop (1987) the cyborg (a true cyborg, compared to the Terminator, whose humanity is only skin deep) sustains massive injuries in his first encounter with a killer robot. And, in Cameron and Hurd's Aliens (1986), their sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the robot or "artificial person" is ripped in half by WATCH OUT! A XENOMORPH! Cameron and Hurd's word for a non-human life form. By this time, Cameron and Hurd’s view of machines is already softening. The humans and the machines are on the same side, and, at the film's climax, it is the badly damaged "artificial person" -- his legless torso resembling a broken, plastic doll -- who saves the human child from being sucked into space.

We define ourselves in terms of what we are not. As the distinction between humans and machines begins to blur, our image of ourselves begins to blur with it. In a futile attempt to maintain the distinction, we work hard to come up with things people can do better than machines. It is our hope that we are different from and, on some level, better than the machines we create. But the truth is that machines can do most things better than people can. Machines can't paint as well as Jackson Pollock, say, but most people can't either. Generally, where we choose to employ them, machines outstrip people easily, and they force us to redefine concepts like intelligence. We fall back on our last line of defense: the capacity to FEEL! Can machines feel? Can they appreciate art and music? Are they alive? In the Science Fiction film they are.
Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, stands Philip K. Dicks 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, on its head. Dicks’ novel is about a bounty hunter who is so human he is capable of empathizing with the ruthless machines he hunts down and destroys. That capacity almost destroys him. Fourteen years later, in Blade Runner, the machines are more human and compassionate than the humans. It's the machines who recite poetry and philosophy and who have "seen things you people wouldn't believe," and it's pain that keeps Roy Baty alive long enough to redeem the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard.

The struggle of human against machine, as it has played out in our best myths, has two main variations. In the first variation, machines are evil. In the second variation, machines are just dangerous, and it's the "mad scientists" who create or use them who are evil or insane. Machines have a potential for evil, but they usually include a built-in safety mechanism to protect people -- the first law of Robotics is not to harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- but, of course, the safety mechanism doesn't always work.
In masterful renditions of the myth like Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both the evil machine and the mad scientist versions of the struggle between human and machine resonate at once. Dangerous men are caught up in dangerous machines. We can see the Strategic Air Command as a machine out of control, we can see it as a machine in the hands of a mad general, or we can see SAC as a cog in the menacing machine we used to call the Cold War, a concept that comes close to what the hindus mean by karma. One big machine. A clockwork. No choice. Exactly the opposite of what we hope to be.

Forbidden Planet (1956) is an especially bleak rendering of the mad scientist myth. After thousands of years of rationality, with the assistance of a machine to end all machines, the Krell are destroyed by monsters from the id. Morbius, in his pursuit of the knowledge and power of the Krell, is transformed into a monster who, subconsiously, seeks to destroy anyone who opposes him.

Most Science Fiction films, however, and in particular the ones in which the machine is a robot, cyborg, or some combination of human and machine, favor, like Lang's Metropolis, the evil machine story. These films include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), Westworld (1973), The Demon Seed (1977), Alien (1979), and, finally, The Terminator (1984), the genre's last rendition of a truly evil machine. The machine in T1 is bad to its alloy bone.

Cameron and Hurd's two Terminator films demonstrate our changing attitudes toward machines with great clarity. Both films are set within the context of an apocalyptic war between humans and machines that follows a 1997 nuclear war between the United States and Russia. As you recall, the nuclear war begins when Skynet, the U.S.A.'s computer-based defense system, achieves self-awareness and attacks the Russians, hoping the human race will be destroyed in the nuclear holocaust that follows. In this, both films are consistent with each other, and with Dr. Strangelove, Colossus: The Forbin Project and other films of the Cold War era.

The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, have the same basic plot. Skynet sends a Terminator from the future to kill Sarah Connor or her son John before John can be born, grow up, and lead the humans in their war against the machines. In both films, the humans send a warrior back through time to protect John and his mother. It is at this point that T1 and T2 diverge. In The Terminator, the protector is a human being, and the Terminator is a machine. In T2, the protector is a machine, and the Terminator is neither human nor machine. He is something else.

In film, what you see and hear is what you get. And what you get in The Terminator are brilliant special effects, muscles, big trucks and bikes, shiny pistols, machine guns, shotguns and other hardware, and a solid rendition of the evil machine myth. What you get in Terminator 2: Judgement Day are even more extravagant special effects, including the "fluid" effects Cameron and Hurd used in The Abyss (1989), and a solid rendition of the mad scientist myth as the three heroes, John Connor, his mom, and John's cyborg protector hustle to stop the mad scientist before he can invent the basic technology that leads to Skynet. To stay alive, they have to stay out of the clutches of a new kind of Terminator who, though Cameron and Hurd call him a machine, is depicted, especially in his grotesque death throes, as essentially organic or worse. Unlike the Terminator in T1, who is a machine disguised as a man, the Terminator in T2 is an organic whole, not an assemblage of parts, and, although it's possible to read "machine" into his strength, agility and relentless focus, when he's consigned to a caldron of molten steel at the climax of the film, he shape shifts, writhes and bellows in agony like a monstrous animal or demon.

T2 is remarkably misanthropic and predictably iconoclastic in its assault on the usual people and institutions, including Ma Bell, bank machines, cops, bikers, foster parents and the city of Los Angeles, which is flattened by a hydrogen bomb. But, in contrast, T2’s rendition of the cyborg who is sent back through time to protect John Connor is heroic. And, just in case we can't follow the sub-text, T2 spells it out for us in a voice-over by Sarah Connor. Watching the cyborg and her kid, Sarah says: "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."

In the film's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the caldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron and Hurd use a series of close-ups to create a beautiful portrait of The Cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might have replaced the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we projected our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of The Cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we might have joined with The Cyborg to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds.

Instead, James Cameron invites us to a boring reprise of The Mission (1986) and the vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries. Cameron seems to have lost his faith in machines, people and cyborgs as well.

Somebody get Gale Anne Hurd on the phone. T3 without Cameron was a waste of her time. Avatar without Hurd was a waste of Cameron’s time. Cameron and Hurd should get back together and do something worthy of 3D CGI. Almost a hundred years of science fiction film is out there waiting to be mashed up into something new and actually mythic.

The 3D Bubble

2011-02-13T10:10:00.001-05:00

After single-handedly creating a 3D bubble with Avatar, James Cameron is trying to fill it. Since Avatar was released last year, the universe of available 3D screens has doubled internationally. That's a lot of seats to fill.

So Cameron's Avatar, already the highest grossing movie of all time, is being re-released today.

The marketing angle for the re-release, aimed at filling some of those seats in the over-built world of 3D theaters, is nine -- yes, nine -- previously unseen minutes of film, picked up from the cutting room floor.

Avatar fans will see their beloved Na'vis mourn the death of a fallen warrior in a "big, emotional scene" that Cameron claims is the best CG he's done. (Like Jesus, Cameron has saved his best wine for last.)

We're also promised a "rousing action-adventure, pulse-pounding" hunting sequence.

Following the re-release today, an extended Avatar DVD will be released in November that includes the new footage, plus an "alternate reality version" of the film that is 16 minutes longer than the original.

Cameron says it will be a long time before there is an Avatar sequel -- if we're lucky, it will be a very long time -- but, apparently, Cameron will be able to find plenty of scraps to keep Avatar fans on the hook during the long wait.

The success of Avatar is a sign of the times. It tells us more about ourselves and the world we live in now than about whether Avatar is a particularly good film, or even a particularly entertaining one.

Escapist movies do well in hard times. And the times these days are hard enough to require exceptionally escapist movies. Avatar fills the bill. More than anything else, it's a movie about escaping from the reality of the human condition.

Sadly, it's not a good movie to boot. In fact, Avatar is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills.

Worst of all, Avatar consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, Avatar is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves. Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless.

Maybe the times are too hard for films that synthesize real experience. Maybe Hollywood can't afford to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists. Maybe the market will only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world.

Avatar is a significant motion picture event. It was designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release was accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. The industry is betting it will be the first of many 3D blockbusters that will be cranked out over the next couple of years. The theaters and seats are waiting. And Cameron has set the bar low enough that Avatar might represent the future of the industry.

That's a pity, because Cameron has done much better in the past. In Avatar, the 3D technology Cameron pursued so faithfully and so completely was just frittered away.

In his best film, T2, Cameron resolved the age-old conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg.

In T2's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the caldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron uses a series of close-ups to create a beautiful and unforgettable portrait of the cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.

But, in Avatar, Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it.

To his credit, Cameron has always sided with men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations. But that's a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in Aliens (1986) and in The Abyss (1989), although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached the movie Avatar rips off most blatantly, Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, The Mission (1986).

Cameron's reprise of The Mission is pure escapism that offers his audience the temporary and vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries.

Ultimately, films exist as memories. I saw Avatar twice when it was first released, once in digital 3D and once in IMAX 3D. I don't vividly remember a single image from the film.

Maybe that's the key to a successful re-release. If you don't remember a film at all, it makes sense to see it again. In the inside out, upside down world of pop culture, the most forgettable films will have the longest lives. Viewers will watch them again and again, as though they're seeing them for the very first time.

Megan Fox's Body

2011-02-13T10:08:00.001-05:00

Is it hers, or does it belong to Michael Bay?

The latest buzz in fandom is the news that Megan Fox, who -- depending on your feelings about Fox -- either quit Transformers 3 or was fired, has been replaced by Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely.

TheWrap's take is that Fox walked off rather than meet director Michael Bay's demand that she put on weight.

Can Huntington-Whitely measure up? I doubt it.

Victoria's Secret vs. Armani

Fox made the mistake of letting Bay pressure her into gaining weight for Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, and Bay's cinematographer and editor had to shoot and cut their way around Fox's hips. In the few scenes where Bay was forced to shoot and use images of Fox from straight on or from behind, she comes across as bloated and leaden. Bay, who claims he made Fox and Transformers co-star Shea Lebeouf, managed to take one of the freshest physical presences to hit the screen in years, and turn her into his version of an inflatable doll. If all we had was Bay's vision of Fox, the first Transformers would have been Fox's peak. She'd have lit up the screen for a moment like summer lightning and be gone.

Fox in Transformers. Am I superficial?

But, luckily, Megan Fox's young career doesn't depend on the egotistical Bay, who is less a maker of stars than a director who was made by them. The all-star cast of the star vehicle Armageddon made Bay the director of young actors and tennis balls he is today.

Megan Fox's future doesn't depend on Bay. It depends on her performances in the about to premier Jonah Hex, where, though she's in the hands of Jimmy Hayward, an inexperienced director, she stars with Josh Brolin, a solid, intelligent performer, and in the soon to released Passion Play, where she plays opposite Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray.

Eat your heart out, Michael Bay. The question is: Can Fox make the transition from teenager to woman of the world in Jonah Hex?

In Passion Play, Fox plays a winged circus freak who escapes from her cage. Performing for Michael Bay should have given her all the real-world experience she needs to be convincing in the role.

Jonah Hex

2011-02-13T10:05:00.001-05:00

It's easy to be dismissive of Jonah Hex, Jimmy Hayward's box office flop.

The film grossed a meager 5 million bucks the weekend it opened, far behind Toy Story 3, and was universally panned by reviewers -- and not without good reason.

The plot is trite and hard to follow, the acting average, and most of the time Hayward's visualization of the comic book material is boring. Ironically, Hayward got his start in the Toy Story franchise. He was an animator on Toy Story and Toy Story 2. But, watching Hayward's Hex, I was reminded of an old friend's put down of Midland, Texas. I spent a week there one night, he told me.

Josh Brolin, a talented and intelligent actor who has been on a roll lately, plods along in the title role. John Malkovitch seems to have dropped in for a couple of disconnected scenes. Malkovich can play villains like Quentin Humbolt, Hex's arch enemy, in his sleep, but there is so little connection between him and Brolin that you have to wonder if they were ever on the same set at the same time.

Megan Fox is billed as a star, but comes across as a bit player, making a cameo appearance. Fox badly needs to make the transition from teenager to woman to put the Transformer franchise behind her, but in Hex she comes across as a kid, dressing up in her grandma's clothes. There is something about her voice that works against Fox. She hasn't learned to make the slight disconnect between her body and her voice work for her the way Monroe did.

Hex won't appeal to fans of the Jonah Hex comic books, either. The writers left too much good stuff out. Fox's Tallulah Black is a far cry from the disfigured female bounty hunter of the Hex books, and El Diablo and Lazarus Lane, two -- or one, depending on how you look at it -- of the books' most imaginative creations, are missing completely.

Tallulah Black and El Diablo

Unlike Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel that established the form, the Hex books spanned so many years and versions that the writers had to boil the comics down in an attempt to distill the essential Jonah Hex from the books. In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, they invariably chose to use the most hackneyed elements of the comics.

The next blockbuster franchise and comic book superhero turned movie icon won't be Jonah Hex. And yet, for anyone who is interested in pop culture and genre films, Jonah Hex is an important movie. Jimmy Hayward has made a very bad film. But, in making it, he has -- inadvertently, perhaps -- tested the limits of turning graphic novels into films.
Hex looks exactly like what it is, a first film by a director who knows absolutely nothing about the way real people move through real space. It ends up being a jumble of disconnected portraits, shots -- panels, if you will -- and, in memory, exists as an exact replica of a comic book. Watching Jonah Hex is like spending 90 minutes reading a graphic novel. No one will come closer to literally translating a graphic novel into film than Jimmy Hayward has.

But will anyone want to? Is thumbing through a graphic novel what most of us go to the movies to do?

Genre films, especially action-adventure films, require a compelling narrative and fast action. Action that is suggested by the static panels of a comic book must be realized in film. If you want to see what happens when a director ignores that basic truth, go see Jonah Hex. If not, save your money and catch Watchmen on cable TV.

The real Jonah Hex

5 Movies That Changed My Life

2011-02-13T10:02:00.001-05:00

I think it's more about me than about the films.
Every time I watch these films, the same scenes bring tears to my eyes. Taken together, the scenes are a study of me. And it surprises me that I haven't changed much over time. I respond to these films in the same way year after year.
Ghandi

Whatever "moral ascendency" the West may have held over the East was lost at the Dharasana Salt Works in India. It's the image of the two men, holding hands as they walk into the clubs, that makes me cry.

England wasn't as tough as America was in the Sixties. Dr. King had to put women and children in front of the dogs and clubs of the Southern cops before we decided we'd had enough.
MacArthur

In the name of your sacred dead. Strike.
Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines is the climactic scene of the MacArthur bio-pic. I don't know if I find the moment when he rallies the Philippine resistance so moving because my own dead are sacred to me, or because I wish they were. My father was among the American troops who liberated the Philippines. He went on to occupy Japan. MacArthur would have known better than to try to move Vietnamese villagers away from the graves of their sacred dead.
The Miracle Worker

She knows!
All of us have been liberated, more or less, from the darkness of mute ignorance by someone. Without communication, we're not human. Life is not worth living.

Tunes of Glory

We do terrible things that can't be undone. Without comrades, we'd be lost.

The Big Chill

I saw The Big Chill when I started dating after the break-up of my first marriage. I was middle-aged and stoned a lot of the time. This scene didn't hit me until I was in the car, getting ready to pull out of the parking lot. I cried for about 10 minutes while my future wife watched me and didn't say anything. We've been together for almost 30 years, and she still hasn't asked me what I was crying about.

Escape To Reality

2011-02-13T09:54:00.001-05:00

When the world gets to be too much for me, I pull out one of my video collections and escape for a couple of days. I have Angels In America, all of The Sopranos, Lonesome Dove, and a ton of Bergman. Most of the time they'll do, but, when things get really rough, I turn to my John Cassavetes Criterion Collection.
More than any other director, John Cassavetes is about people at their limits, bound up, boxed in by their marriages, their friends, their sex, their race, their age, the limits of their talent, and any other cage or corner Cassavetes can cram them into. And they usually don’t get out. They find their salvations, if they find them, inside their cages. Even if a Cassavetes character appears to escape, we can’t be sure. When Cassavetes and Peter Falk leave Ben Gazzara in London at the end of Husbands, it doesn’t feel like Gazzara has slipped out of his cage. It feels like his friends have left him on the battlefield to die.

Although it doesn’t include Husbands, the Criterion Collection’s boxed set of five Cassavetes films provides an easy, though expensive, way to acquire a taste for Cassavetes. The set has Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977) and the 2000 documentary, A Constant Forge: The Life and Art of John Cassavetes. Or you can order most of Cassavetes’ films and the documentary individually from Netflix.

Cassavetes was, arguably, the father of American independent film. His first film, Shadows, was made at about the time French directors were creating the New Wave. It's a beat film. Cassavetes, like the French, subordinated plot to the mise en scene. His films weren’t about the narrative. The story was often beside the point; just something to hang the film on. To Cassavetes and the French auteurs, film was synthesized experience, and the story was just an occasion for that synthesis. The French bought the rights to dime store novels for their plots. Cassavetes invented situations. His films have beginnings and ends, but they are, like direct cinema and cinema verite documentaries, essentially situational and episodic. The end of each episode and the way it’s resolved are determined, not by the requirements of a plot, but by the inner workings of the episode itself. Affairs end. Men go home to their wives. Women who have nervous breakdowns come home to their families when they get out of the hospital. They put their kids to bed, clean up the dishes and go to bed with their husbands. Strip joint owners who get mixed up with the mob get killed. And the play must go on.

To the cinema verité style and structure, Cassavetes added improvisation. He worked out scenes in collaboration with his actors instead of forcing his view of the scenes on them. Cassavetes’ approach to directing let his actors bring their own life experiences to situations and allowed him to add their sense of what is authentic and what is not to his own. The tension between rigid direction and improvisation, between conformity and self-expression, is a recurring subtext in Cassavetes’ films, from Shadows to his Pirandellian masterpiece, Opening Night.

In Shadows , Lelia is a young, black artist, cornered by race, gender and family. She’s the kid sister of Hugh, a singer who can’t sing, and Ben, a horn player we never hear play. Hugh and his agent, the only person who can stand the way Hugh sings, tour second-rate clubs in the Midwest. Ben listens to jazz from the corners of rooms; cruises New York City bars and cafes with his friends, trying to get laid. Lelia hangs out with Ben and his crew, and with artists and intellectuals, older guys who know things Ben and his friends don’t know. She falls for a good-looking white boy, who dumps her when he meets brother Hugh, because, unlike Lelia and Ben, Hugh is obviously black. Lelia ends up on a dance floor in the arms of a middle-class black man she meets at a party, the kind of man Lelia and her brothers think of as a square but others might call solid. Cassavetes leaves her there, moves on to watch Hugh go off on another road trip, and to watch Ben and his pals get beaten into unconsciousness in the men’s room of a bar when they try to pick up the wrong women. Cassavetes crammed that action and the feeling of the beat Fifties into one black-and-white box in 1959. It was ten years later before he was able to make his next independent film, Faces, a portrait of a marriage on the rocks.

Faces was Cassavetes’ film for the Sixties, and the first Cassavetes and Rowlands collaboration. It was the beginning of a body of work that eventually exhausted the themes Cassavetes took up in Shadows: women on the edge, the way families and friends tie us up but make us strong, the life and death struggle to be authentic and spontaneous instead of phony. Faces is Cassavetes' least successful film, although it's his most accessible and appreciated effort. It's his least filmic and most photographic film. In Faces, an L.A. executive leaves his wife for a prostitute, played by Rowlands. His wife, Lynn Carlin, tries to commit suicide after a one-night stand with Seymour Cassel, a hipster she picks up in a club. The executive goes home to his wife and, in a scene that breaks the static, monotonous repetition of faces that dominates the film, chases the hipster out of the house. In addition to Rowlands, Carlin and Cassel, the cast of Faces included Fred Draper, Val Avery and Elizabeth Deering, actors Cassavetes worked with for the next ten years. Faces was Rowland’s first shot at portraying a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Her second shot came six years later in A Woman Under the Influence.

There is something almost unbearably edgy about the young Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. It’s as if somebody has jammed a 220v wire into her brain. It takes her about two minutes to convince me she’s the most troubled woman I’ll ever see. Her relationship with Peter Falk is tense. There is an acceptance of violence against women in the film I find deeply disturbing. And yet, A Woman Under the Influence is about the kind of people I know well. Working class people. Never enough living space. Not much education and culture. Sometimes not enough money. They fight at the dinner table. But there is redemption in the physicality of these Cassavetes’ characters, in their muscle. It’s a punch, a roundhouse right, that brings Rowlands down to earth and restores her to her family. To her kids. To the dirty dishes that, when all is said and done, have to be taken from the table to the sink. In A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes shows us a family coming together, closing the doors on the outside world and making what they can of their lives. A Woman Under the Influence added Lady Rowlands and Katherine Cassavetes to Cassavetes’ troop of actors.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the fourth film in the Criterion set, is Cassavetes’ film noir classic. It’s the darkest of Cassavetes’ films, not just visually – most of it was filmed at night with available light — but emotionally as well. It’s Cassavetes’ most bitter film. When the mob decides to kill him for his club, escape is never an option for Cosmo Vitelli. He has no real family or friends. His girl friend is a stripper. The most important thing in his life is a third-rate floor show he created for his tawdry strip joint. Vitelli, played by Ben Gazzara, gets shot in the gut while he’s trying to murder a Chinese bookie to pay off a debt to the mob. He manages to kill most of the mob, but he ends up bleeding to death, slowly, while he paces the sidewalk outside his club.

In Opening Night, the last of the films in the Criterion collection, Gena Rowlands plays an aging actress, struggling with her age, her relationship with her co-star, played by Cassavetes, the demands of her director, the limits of the script, and the death of a young fan who gets hit by a car while she’s watching Rowlands leave the theater. Rowlands is haunted by the girl’s ghost. On the verge of breaking down, Rowlands kills the girl’s ghost and her own youth. Playing a scene with Cassavetes, she saves the show and her career with an improvised performance on opening night. The film is a triumph for Cassavetes. As the writer and director of Opening Night, he can do what he was never able to do in the real world. He can direct the play’s audience and their reaction to him and Rowlands.

The audience loves them, of course .

I guess I do, too. The easy explanation for that is to say I like melancholy moods, dark streets, and the rain. I like redemption. I like to see the old order brought down and to see chaos reign. I like reluctant heroes and the kind of women who work retail. And there’s plenty of that in Cassavetes. But it’s more than that.

Cassavetes knew that it’s not what you see, but what you remember that counts. It’s the way films live in our memories that matters. And he gave us a lot to remember. He gave us close-ups, and he gave us enough time with his characters to get to know them well.

I remember Ben Carruthers in Shadows, walking down the street in a coat that’s too light for New York City in the wintertime; Seymour Cassel fleeing down the hill in Faces; Gena Rowlands dancing, Peter Falk climbing a hill with his crew, Katherine Cassavetes guarding the stairs to keep Rowlands away from the kids in A Woman Under the Influence; Ben Gazzara in the dark, getting his orders from the mob, and Gazzara in the light, standing in the spotlight with Mr. Sophistication and his strippers in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Rowlands beating her youth to death in a hotel room, crawling toward her dressing room, putting her dukes up when she’s improvising with Cassavetes in Opening Night. And I remember John Cassavetes, laughing and bounding around the stage in Opening Night, while the audience laughs out loud and applauds.

When I watch Cassavetes’ films, I feel I’m in the presence of myths.

Can I identify the myths? Can I say who Cassavetes’ characters remind me of, who the major and minor deities are in Cassavetes’ pantheon? Who is that with the wound that will not heal? Who is that, chasing the suitor from his house? Who is that, leading his men out to work? Who is that, leading the women out to dance? Can I name them? Not a chance. It was Cassavetes’ achievement to create a pantheon of characters who suggest mythic figures without names. I could no more name them than the Greeks, gathered around the hearth to listen to the poet spin his yarns, could say who Achilles and Odysseus reminded them of.

Time Travel In The '60s

2011-02-13T09:45:00.001-05:00

Compared to the action-packed super-realism of time travel films like the Terminator series and 12 Monkeys, the black-and-white video technology of The Star Wagon, a 1966 television play, written by Maxwell Anderson and directed by Karl Genus, is archaic. But Genus’ direction and the relaxed and intimate acting of a cast that includes Orson Bean, Joan Lorring, Eileen Brennan and Dustin Hoffman make The Star Wagon one of the most entertaining attempts to use the idea of time travel to dramatize the tension between free will and destiny I’ve seen.

The Star Wagon, produced for WNET and NET Playhouse at the time that National Educational Television was evolving into the Public Broadcasting System, is one of the television plays available from distributors like Broadway Theatre Archive who specialize in early television productions. It’s also available as a rental from Netflix.

Taped mainly on location, The Star Wagon follows Bean, a dreamy inventor, and his earthy sidekick, Hoffman, as they try to reverse their fortunes by turning back time. If the outcome of their journey through time seems sappy and predictable nowadays, that may say more about the cynicism of the 21st Century than it does about the naiveté of television audiences in the '60s, who were comfortable with Hollywood endings, the triumph of good over evil and the idea that innocence, lost in time, can be restored. And some of Anderson’s themes — that there are no great men, that nothing matters more than freedom, and that the business of business is the fleecing of the unwary – seem, in this age of Ponzi schemes and bailouts, downright timeless.

Television is an intimate medium, suited for low-key performances, and Genus’ cast, led by Bean and Lorring in the role of Bean’s long-suffering wife, deliver the kind of casual intimacy seldom seen in film. Genus uses his performers and the low resolution images of early black-and-white video to create a unique mix of impressionism and naturalism. The high contrast images of Genus’ actors, overexposed to the extent that the actors’ bodies seem to glow, are painterly and impressionistic, but the performances Genus and his actors create are natural and realistic.

Genus’ cast has a remarkable ability to be with one another, to be with Maxwell Anderson’s script, and to demonstrate that good acting is, in fact, reacting. The result is a kind of naturalness that even directors like John Cassavetes, who were completely committed to naturalism and improvisation, never achieved. Cassavetes was able to use improvisation to structure his films by creating realistic situations, but the dialogue his actors improvised seldom matched Anderson’s ear for small talk, flip comments, and the kind of gentle razzing we see in The Star Wagon.

Anderson and Genus deliver poetry, as well. Standing on the star wagon, Hoffman looks like an angel with one good wing. There is a dreamlike, druggy quality to Bean and Hoffman’s laughter as they launch themselves back through time. Bean moves effortlessly from innocence, as he rehearses a hymn, The Holy City, with Lorring, to funny sexuality as Eileen Brennan digs in his front pocket for candy at a picnic; and Bean’s dark and violent rebirth leaves the impression of opera, of voices singing together to reveal the dark underside of Anderson’s comedy before Hoffman yanks Bean from the river to begin life over, half-drowned and miserable, lying in the mud with his head in Brennan’s wet lap.

Technically, these scenes of Bean’s death and rebirth by the river are as advanced as any experimental cinema of the Sixties. Bean’s passage begins with the sound of Hoffman pushing Brennan out to the way and jumping into the river, but we aren’t allowed to see Hoffman pull Bean out of the water until we enter the drowning Bean’s thoughts and contemplate nothing less than the meaning of life.

It is possible to think of life as a long series of paths not taken, doors opened or not opened, decisions made one way instead of another. It is a convention of most time travel films that the journey back through time will either change nothing, or it will change everything. The art of the film is to show why this should be so, to explain in a satisfying way why history had to happen exactly as it did happen. In The Star Wagon, Anderson breaks with that convention. He raises the possibility of changing history by going back in time, and then rejects that possibility as an act of will. Orson Bean’s Stephen returns to the present tense of his life as we found him, not because he has to, but because he wants to. But he is better for having made the journey, even if the world is not, and, watching the film, I felt the sweetness of life in a way I had not felt it since those summer evenings long ago, when I was a boy and I waited nervously at shortstop for our pitcher to deliver his first pitch.

At the end of the play, Stephen tells us his time machine is just a way of remembering the past. Karl Genus’ The Star Wagon is as good a way as any of remembering some of broadcast television’s best years. And that’s something, in my view, upon which it is worth spending some time.

Grey Gardens Revisited

2011-02-13T09:41:00.001-05:00

There is an element of the hunt in documentary films, and an element of the hunter in the film makers who make them, a delicious kind of trophy hunting at its lightest, but, at its heaviest, a predatory savaging of people and events that exposes the dark side of subjects and the exploitive nature of documentary film.
The Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens (1975) is a film portrait of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. It’s a film about eccentrics and eccentricity, about marginal people whose living conditions reflect the condition of their lives.

Film lends itself exceptionally well to the substitution of one thing for another when two things regularly appear together. Over the course of the Maysles brothers' film, the Grey Gardens estate comes to stand for the lives of the Beales in the same way the American flag has come to stand for America and the White House for the President. If there were nothing more to Grey Gardens (1975) than that – and there is – it would still be an important work of art, because it’s a wonderful example of film as sympathetic magic. It gives us the illusion of power over the world by reducing complicated people and situations to a manageable size.

The genre the Maysles brothers chose to work in had rules, and they were accused from time to time of breaking them, of manipulating events, of straying outside the boundaries of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, particularly in the case of Gimme Shelter (1970), a sensational film that features the murder of a black Rolling Stones fan at Altamont.

Direct cinema captures real events as they happen, without interfering with them in any way. There is no direction in direct cinema, no “do this” or “do that again.” No questions. No staged scenes. Nature documentaries are perhaps the purest example of the form. The film makers witness horrific events, but never interfere. Cinéma vérité, another style of modern documentary, has some latitude. It’s more about truth than about reality, and, as long as the film conveys the truth, it may wander away from real events.

In the case of films like Grey Gardens (2009), a historical drama that HBO has run off and on for a couple of years, following its triumph at the Emmies, neither the rules of direct cinema nor cinéma vérité apply. The intention of the producers is simply entertainment, and they're free to pick over the bones of the Maysles' kill any way they can. HBO doesn't broadcast Grey Gardens as part of it's regular schedule anymore, but, in a move that harkens back to the days when movies were all glitz and glitter to brighten the lives of the little people, they put it up on HBO On Demand over the Christmas holidays. "They were steeped in affluence and privilege," the HBO promo proclaims. "Yet their lives in East Hampton became a riches-to-rags story that made national headlines." There is a metaphor lurking around there somewhere.

A cottage industry has sprung up around Grey Gardens and the Beales since the Maysles first documented the squalor and decay of the Beales’ lives. Since Grey Gardens (1975) the documentary, we’ve had Grey Gardens the musical, Grey Gardens the book, Grey Gardens the web site and, finally, HBO's version of the Beales' story. But I doubt HBO will have the last word.

Over the years, the Beales have attracted a cult following: people who know what it’s like to live on the fringes. But the audience for works based on the lives of the Edies is more general than a cult. It includes any of us who have ever slowed down to look at the scene of an accident.

The story of the Edies coincides with the long, downhill slide of American society, the decay of the American dream, and the slow stratification of America into two cultures, one affluent and above ground, the other underground, it’s people trapped in poverty. If it could happen to the Edies, it could happen to anyone.

American capitalism has always had two spurs to keep us moving up the steep hill of success. One boot prods us with the promise of fortune and fame, the other with the specter of disaster, with the threat of losing all we have suddenly or, like the Beales, gradually, as we get older. The Beales’ story is frightening and fascinating. It’s hard to look at it, but it’s harder to look away.

The Maysles brothers had an eye for the wounded straggler, for the animal ready to die. Perhaps it’s because their subjects knew they were damaged that the Maysles brothers were able to stay above the people and events they filmed, to appear to be superior to their subjects, to have the upper hand. Their contemporary, D. A. Pennebaker, seemed more respectful, more deferential to his subjects – even, as in the case of the War Room (1993) when Pennebaker’s camera grovels at the feet of James Carville and Mary Matalin, obsequious.

Pennebaker had a knack for getting in on the beginning of things: Timothy Leary and the counterculture; Bob Dylan; Joplin and Hendricks at the Monterrey Pop Festival; and, finally, the Clintons. The Maysles brothers, Al and David, had a knack for being there at the end of things, the final acts, the death throes of the traveling salesman and the Counterculture, the unraveling of Camelot.

By the time he filmed Grey Gardens (1975), Al Maysles was one of the best cinematographers in the world, and the Maysles brothers had mastered the art of manipulating subjects and situations. They had developed a gift for narrative unmatched in documentary film. No one tells a story the way the Maysles brothers do.

“Once you’ve lost that push, you’ve had it,” Paul Brennan, the "Badger," tells the camera in Salesman (1968). Brennan suffers from too much awareness. He knows he’s a dead-ender in a dying profession. Negativity is the unpardonable sin of Brennan’s world, and Al Maysles patiently and carefully documents Brennan’s descent into negativity during Brennan’s last days as a bible salesman.

“We can get it together,” Mick Jagger tells the crowd at Altamont, just before a shot of what appears to be the Hell’s Angels killing a black fan who pulls a gun on them. Earlier in the concert, when Grace Slick, watching the Hell’s Angels beat her fans with pool cues, said: “People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line,” she was, at that spaced-out, sappy moment, more in touch with the direction of American society than the slightly confused Jagger who believed Altamont was going to set an example for America about how to behave at large gatherings.

The Maysles brothers persuaded Jagger and the Stones to let Al film them, watching a rough cut of Gimme Shelter on a Steenbeck editing table, ostensibly to provide a gimmick to structure the film. The brothers’ real reason was to make the apparent knifing of a fan by the Angels the central point of the film. Without the knifing and the opportunity to make Jagger eat his words, the Maysles brothers would have had a mediocre, though beautifully photographed concert film, whose high points were scenes of Jagger expressing his androgynous sexuality and young Tina Turner fellating her microphone. The violence and the obvious naiveté of the Stones and Grace Slick gave the brothers a chance for something much bigger, a chance to take down the Stones, Slick and the Counterculture at the same time. Eerily, Jagger’s helicopter exit from the Altamont speedway foreshadowed America’s final exit from Saigon, and, by the end of Gimme Shelter, Jagger’s stare was as vacant as the barren landscape in the last shot of the film.

For big-game hunters like the Maysles brothers, who already had bagged the "Badger", the Stones, Grace Slick and the end of the Counterculture, two eccentric ladies in a run-down mansion were sitting ducks.

The Fall Of 2007

2011-01-29T09:34:00.003-05:00

The 83rd Academy Award nominations for documentary film were announced last week. Collectively, this year's nominees documented the global financial meltdown, fracking for natural gas, edgy street art, dumpster diving on a massive scale, and war on the ground in Afghanistan.

More than other genres, documentary films tend to be political and, sometimes, combative. Their intent is to document something, and it's hard, if not impossible, to separate the importance of what they document from the skill with which they document it. One suspects that Restrepo, an important film that's not particularly well made, is the odds on favorite this year, especially because the first living GI to win the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War fought in the combat operation Restrepo documents. (I jotted down some thoughts about Restrepo earlier this year.) But it's entirely possible that the Academy will decide that the global financial crisis or what natural gas producers are doing to the environment outweighs the war in Afghanistan, or even that the artistry of Waste Land or Exit Through The Gift Shop deserves the Best Documentary award. The Academy often surprises me. Last year, when I commented on Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling, I was convinced the Academy would hand Kathryn Bigelow the Best Director Oscar, but wouldn't -- couldn't afford to, really -- give the Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker in the face of Avatar's overwhelming box office and the massive build-out in 3D venues that was going on all over the world. The Academy proved me wrong. They showed me they did "have the heart to take on the real world." (Unless, of course, it was those pesky Palestinians who did Avatar in by painting themselves blue in Bil'in -- a case of bad timing for James Cameron.)

Documentary films about current events and living people are very much about timing. In the Sixties, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame ran an hour and was considered gutsy journalism. Fifty years later, a CBS follow-up on migrant farm workers merited only 5 minutes of air time.

The September Issue (2009), directed by R.J. Cutler and filmed by Robert Richman, is a documentary film that illustrates the importance of -- and the surreal nature of -- timing. The film is a portrait of Anna Wintour, Vogue's U.S. editor-in-chief, and Grace Coddington, her creative director, shot in the context of the roll-out of Vogue's collossal September 2007 Fall fashion issue.

Vogue Cover, September 2007

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The September Issue is an examination of power and manipulation, and, especially, of power in the hands of a competent and confident woman. Most film portraits of women executives show embattled women, under fire and hanging on by their fingernails. In 2007, Anna Wintour was firmly entrenched and riding the wave of a booming economy and fashion industry. The sub-text of The September Issue is an examination of a successful collaboration, of the way editors and artists work in the real world, and of the way auteurs like Wintour and Coddington make signature art out of the work of creative people. And it is, finally, a comment on relevance, satisfaction, and the underlying insecurity that saps joy from even the most successful celebrities.

Formally, The September Issue is an example of cinema verité in its simplest, least challenging form. It mixes more or less coherent shots of live action with interviews. The problem with that approach is that it turns the film into a contest of sorts. The film maker tries to get at the truth, the subjects of the film try to hide it — or, at least, to slant the truth. Interviews are like testimony, the characters tell you what they want you to know.

Not surprisingly, the live action scenes tell us more about Anna Wintour than she tells us about herself. Her center stage seat at shows and the nervous fawning of the designers she visits deliver a convincing picture of her position atop the world of design in 2007.

The September Issue was filmed in 2007, just before the beginning of the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession. If the world's business cycle were depicted as a giant rollercoaster, the lift sweeping up to dizzying heights, the first drop plunging down at the steepest angle the human body can tolerate without blacking out, Anna Wintour and Vogue were, in September of 2007, poised on the brink of the fall. The September issue of Vogue, essentially an extravagantly produced catalog of designer clothes and accessories, ran 840 pages. The issue has become a collector's item, selling on ebay for as much as $500 a copy. In 2007, it was a celebration of the fashion industry, a self-congratulatory revel in wealth reminiscent of Versailles with one important difference: the world of fashion and the incomes that sustain it have barely taken a hit from what has been, for the ordinary men and women who used to pick up Vogue on their way out of the supermarket, a devastating recession. To be sure, Vogue's advertising revenues are down from 2007, when one of Vogue's advertisers, Burton Tansky of Neiman Marcus implored Anna Wintour to pressure the designers she had under her thumb to deliver their creations faster. (If you want to see how a powerful man on the verge of a rant can be reined in by a beautiful woman, watch Wintour's pat on the hand settle Tansky down.) But the drop in ad revenue may be more a reflection of a general feeling of discontent in an industry whose players were personally bilked by money managers than a reflection of specific worries about the global demand for designer clothes or the bang for the buck of advertising dollars. After all, weren't most of those ads in the September issue a display of plumage, a demonstration of the wealth and importance of the advertiser?

Last night, ploughing through a copy of Vogue's September issue I brought home from my public library, I was struck by the fact that I had to wade through 313 pages of ads before I encountered the first snippet of text pretending not to be advertising.

Then, in a typical pop culture collision, I found a Rebecca Johnson profile of Michelle Obama, complete with gorgeous photographs by Annie Leibovitz, sandwiched between Grace Coddington fashion spread and a charming essay about life at the top of the New York scene in a Greenwich Village townhouse whose decor, according to the article, was inspired by the Barbara Streisand remake of A Star Is Born.

Vogue September 2007, pp 774,775

Photograph: Michelle Obama by Annie Liebovitz

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Was Hillary Clinton just not fashionable enough for her party's elite? Is Michelle Obama as perfect as the Vogue interview and Liebovitz photographs make her seem? Or were the images of Michelle Obama manipulated like the images of the models in the Coddington photoshoots with their interchangeable heads, bodies and air-brushed skin, photoshopped to perfection? Did Vogue prepare the small town Iowa battleground for an Obama victory? Did a media empire help bring down Hillary Clinton because she was no longer chic, no longer the face of the future toward which fashion -- at least in the mind of Anna Wintour -- must incline. I suppose that's a stretch, more the stuff of fiction than of some documentary that might have been made. But I think it's self-evident that the Obamas' style is rather neatly tuned to the style of Conde Naste publications like Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired.

Of course, there are no scenes of the Michelle Obama interview in Cutler and Richman's documentary film. Successful politicians learned as far back as the Kennedy era to keep documentary film makers at a distance.

The people who get scrutinized in The September Issue are Wintour and Coddington, and the element of suspense that holds the film together -- even documentaries require some kind of glue -- is Grace Coddington's struggle to get her art, intact, into the issue, even though it is often at odds with Wintour's vision. In the end, Grace gets most of her work in -- at one point she observes that she nearly has the entire issue to herself -- because she can do what artists do: synthesize experience. Everything is grist for Coddington's mill and her imagination, even the documentary film makers themselves. Before the film is over, she has Richman jumping -- if not through hoops -- at least up and down.

Coddington may be the resident genius at Vogue, but she doesn't get the cover. For that job, Wintour brings in Italian photographer Mario Testino. And, to my eye, it is Testino, not Coddington, who, in a homage to Fellini, manages to produce the only images that are distinguishable from and rise above the pages and pages of ads.

Vogue September 2007 Photograph by Mario Testino

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The real winner in The September Issue is, of course, Anna Wintour. After living for four years with the rumor -- or the fact -- that she was the inspiration for the The Devil Wears Prada, The September Issue gave Wintour an opportunity of create her own image. She comes across as determined and opinionated, without seeming abusive, a far cry from the editor in The Devil Wears Prada. If anything, Wintour manages, as improbable as it seems, to portray herself as quite vulnerable. She appears to have gotten what she wanted from the film.

The September Issue A&E IndieFilms and Actual Reality Pictures

Not that I'm completely surprised.

Maybe it was the faint scent of expensive perfume still lingering on the pages of my library copy of Vogue or maybe I overdosed on the images of beautiful women, but, watching The September Issue and Anna Wintour, I suddenly remembered filming an interview with Lady Bird Johnson -- a woman I had not thought of as particularly attractive -- at her television station in Austin. After the interview, I rode down in an elevator with her, and I was shocked to find myself suddenly overwhelmed by her perfume, her dark red lipstick, perfect make-up and luxuriant fur coat, her obvious wealth and power. Maybe it was pheromones. I could barely breathe, and, when we got off of the elevator, my hands were shaking and I was feeling weak in the knees.

The September Issue is available from Amazon and Netflix.

The Legacy Of Fred W. Friendly And Edward R. Murrow

2011-01-22T12:39:00.005-05:00

In 1960, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow teamed up to make Harvest of Shame. The film was Murrow's last television documentary before he left CBS to head up John F. Kennedy's United States Information Agency and the Voice of America. Ironically, as a U.S.I.A bureaucrat, Murrow tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a B.B.C. broadcast of Harvest of Shame.

Harvest of Shame documented the living conditions of American migrant farm workers, and recorded the prevailing attitude of big business, lobbiests and government officials toward the farm workers and their living conditions.

Edward R. Murrow has had many imitators, but none of them has managed to channel Murrow's combination of serious journalism and real concern for people who were unable to manage in any way the oppressive political and economic culture that impinged on their lives.

Harvest of Shame is one of television's most respected documentaries, not because it was especially effective, but because of its intention and style.

Harvest of Shame originally aired just after Thanksgiving Day in November 1960. A follow-up report by CBS last year -- a 5 minute segment, compared to the 50 minutes of the original -- found that the migrants' pauper wages were a little better and the workers were mostly poor Hispanics now instead of poor blacks and whites, but the working conditions and daily lives of migrant farm workers have not much changed.

Harvest of Shame gave a face to the faceless, advocated for the powerless, and created a lasting example of how television documentaries -- and journalism in general -- can engage important issues without bias or polemics, with compassion instead of passion, and with respect for its subjects.

The shots of workers, voicing their frustration about trying to make a living at the bottom of the American economy, and the shots of a corporate lobbiest, reducing and explaining away the tragedy of people permanently abandoned to poverty, could, in these times of massive, permanent unemployment and under-employment -- especially of the undereducated and people over 50 -- be filmed today. We only lack the film makers, journalists, and the subjects who -- like the migrant farm workers of the 60's -- convincingly demonstrate the flaws in American society, the disjunction between our basic values and the way we allow some of our fellow Americans to live.

Harvest of Shame, for the most part, let's the workers and bureaucrats speak for themselves, admittedly in the context of Murrow's narration. But the film manages to balance Murrow's narration with the true faces and voices of the workers, captured by David Lowe, in a way that never overpowers the workers and their story. Typically, Murrow closed the show with a comment that conveys his belief that words -- and reason -- matter. Typically, Murrow closed the show with a comment that conveys his belief that words — and reason — matter, that it is possible to talk about occasions for anger, without histrionics and without acting anger out.

Are there real barriers to producing documentaries like Harvest of Shame these days? In many ways, they should be easier to do. The cost of video equipment is more affordable than it's ever been, and venues like YouTube let documentary film makers "self publish." The problem, if there is one, lies in finding subjects.

Harvest of Shame can be purchased on DVD at Amazon, or, with a leading commercial, be viewed for free at YouTube, CBS, or here, courtesy of CBS News.

The Green Hornet (2011)

2011-01-14T23:36:00.005-05:00

He had it all. Biomimicry, a gas gun that made a wierd sound, a big, fast car, called the Black Beauty, an Asian sidekick and The Flight Of The Bumblebee. I listened to The Hornet on the radio; read the comic books; watched the movie serial on Saturdays. Van Williams played the Hornet and Bruce Lee played Kato on TV. There's a great scene of Lee taking a Green Hornet set apart in the Bruce Lee bio-pic: Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. So, I had high expectations for The Green Hornet (2011), the Seth Rogen and Jay Chou movie directed by Michel Gondry that opened this weekend.

But, once you get past the twist that the movie is a comedy based on a premise that would have made a good Saturday Night Live skit, there's not much there, unless you think it's fun to play Name That Team and come up with interesting duos that Rogen and Chou remind you of. I figure Aykroyd and Belushi or Aykroyd and Murray or Aykroyd and just about anyone.

Rogen was one of the Hornet's writers, and he's probably a better writer than a comedian. Some of the gags and one-liners in The Green Hornet are laugh-out-loud funny. But be sure to see the 3D version. I imagine the film would be incredibly boring in 2D, mainly because The Green Hornet lacks an interesting villian. Making a fun, comic rendition of a comic book is at least as good an idea as making an exceptionally dark one, but comedy or no, comic book heroes and comic book movies need interesting villains, and The Green Hornet's Chudnofsky falls flat on his face.

Cameron Diaz is adequate in the Girl Friday role. Her face is the only image from The Green Hornet that sticks in my memory. It's as if she's the first real person I've seen in 3D. Tom Wilkinson does a brilliant turn as the Hornet's dad.

Hollywood badly needs to come up with a new superhero worthy of sequels and prequels, and some blockbuster films to fill the 3D bubble created by Avatar. The Green Hornet doesn't seem likely to fill either bill.

Equus

2011-01-11T12:59:00.357-05:00

A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole, uncountable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Then another. Then another. Why? Moments snap together, like magnets forging a chain of shackles. Why?” -- Equus (1977) United Artists

To which universe of discourse does Jared Loughner -- or, more precisely, our idea of Jared Loughner -- belong? Most of the discussions or arguments I've seen about Loughner fall either into the universe of politics or the universe of mental health.

Was violent political rhetoric the cause of Loughner's vicious attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her friends, staff and Tucson constituents who had come out to see her Saturday? Was the cause some kind of still undiagnosed mental illness? Or was it a combination of out of control political rhetoric that demonized Giffords and a mental illness that made Loughner especially susceptible to the rhetoric and liable to act out his hatred? In the first case, the remedies -- the things commentators suggest we do to minimize the risk of another tragedy like the Tucson massacre -- are along the lines of toning down the rhetoric. In the second case, the remedies boil down to better ways to identify and track mentally ill persons and to make sure they can't get their hands on weapons. Coming up with third case remedies is more complex, because that effort requires us to come to grips with the way culture affects individuals, the way people and society interact.

Personally, I'd consign the Tucson tragedy to the universe of popular culture.

Political commentary at all levels has become highly profitable entertainment. The style and content of radio talk shows, cable news and opinion shows, popular blogs -- and even amateur posts like this one -- are designed as much to attract and entertain an audience as they are to inform. And, sometimes, the most entertaining shows and comments on those shows shed more heat than light. They appeal more to the emotions than to the intellect, because emotion attracts eyeballs and clicks, and that means ad revenue -- something that's as critical in the blogosphere as it is in the world of television.

As Ted Koppel, commenting on the echo chamber phenomenon so familiar to anyone who spends time in the blogosphere, said last year, "we live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable." (Ted Koppel, Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news, Washington Post, November 14, 2010)

That kind of analysis and commentary drowns television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases. Commentators like Olbermann on the one hand and O'Reilly on the other, Koppel said, "show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone."

To make matters worse, in the blogosphere, the Wild West of popular culture, the ad space is completely out of control. Who puts the ads up in the blogosphere? No one really. Mostly, they're generated automatically to match the trending topics at a site.

That leads to some interesting chance encounters. Here are a couple of ads that popped up at a leading liberal blog -- one that would never purposely exploit a tragedy or promote violence -- while I was writing this post about popular culture and the Tucson massacre.

Source: Google Ads at firedoglake

This is a world gone mad. The loose talk, provocative language and demonization of specific people by entertainers at both ends of the political spectrum fall into the category of popular culture alongside pulp fiction, movies, television, comic books, video games and all of the other things that may or may not make Americans more violent.

The problem is there is very little in popular culture to contain and reconcile contradictions like our need for freedom on one hand and security on the other, our right to speak freely versus society's right to protect itself from speech that might inflame and, if not cause, at least contribute to the kind of violence we saw in Tucson. Opposing viewpoints are not presented in the context of synthesis, but in the context of argument. And the substitution of argument for synthesis and reconciliation leads to absurdities like Fox News, claiming to be "fair and balanced."

The bad news is that the economics of popular culture make its style and content unlikely to change.

We may have to settle for remedies that make it more likely that people will realize "it's just a movie," and less likely that they will mistake entertainment for reality. I fear things do not seem to be moving in that direction. But they don't have to be. Now and then, pop culture does rise to the level of reconciliation.

Equus is an example of art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence. Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art. Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity. His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.

Alan Strang's fictional parents -- like Jared Loughner's real world parents -- are unable to explain their son's madness. Unlike the Loughner parents who, reportedly, blame themselves for the way Loughner turned out, Strang's parents are not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang. And, while Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook. The connections are just too complex.

Self-flagellation. Equus (1977) United Artists Peter Firth as Alan Strang

One of the reasons Equus works is that it grounds itself in antiquity and refers to fundamentally important things like the struggle between reason and emotion, the Appollonian versus the Dyonesian in culture. The role of psychiatry in Shaffer's Equus is to civilize the child, to bend the individual's will, even his grasp of reality, to the demands of society, even if the unique and creative individual is destroyed in the process.

Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"

As a play, of course, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant. And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance. It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity. It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject. For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film. And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable. He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.

Richard Burton as Martin Dysart Equus (1977) United Artists

Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.

Account for me, Equus demands.

Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can account for Jared Loughner or rule out the possibility that it was some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere, that, in this world where everything is connected to everything else, forged the last link in his chains.

I wonder if there are any American institutions left that are capable of reconciling freedom of speech with the responsibility to speak reasonably, to limit self-expression to less hurtful forms than we've experienced in the last couple of decades. At one time, I believed the American criminal justice system, grounded in the Constitution, was such an institution. Now, I'm not sure. The courts seem to be politicized. Even the Constitution itself is the subject of sophomoric chalk talks, foisted off on television viewers as political analysis, while other commentators -- just as opinionated -- decorate their rants with lines better men spoke in better times. Is it any wonder that by now we view other opinions as, essentially, unreconcilable with our own?

The truth is unlikely to come to us from polemicists on the right or on the left. It will come -- if it comes at all-- tentatively, in the form of a dialogue, a collaboration. The best collaborations take place inside the same skull, inner dialogues, examinations of conscience, that proceed haltingly, full of doubt. By their very nature, they must lack conviction, and lack of conviction is popular culture's unforgivable sin.

That such a dialogue can occur any longer in the context of American pop culture is doubtful to say the least.

YouTube

2010-12-15T10:54:00.002-05:00

Web 2.0 had witnessed the rise of citizen journalism and a brand of publishing that reminds me of the wild, wild West, compared to the staid publications of the East Coast with their European sensibilites and, as Norman Mailer put it, their "bloodless, gutless restraint. "

Cyberspace tends to be collective, combative and ideological. And Julian Assange, publisher of WikiLeaks, is one of the most combative and ideological publishers on the web. Assange and the leaked documents and videos he has published are now at the red hot center of the battle to control the flow of information over the world wide web. Although Assange is not the first publisher to make government documents available to the public, his publication of gun camera videos and U.S. Department of State cables is massive, both in terms of its sheer volume and in terms of its buzz. And it is the only leak around right now. In my view, there is nothing on WikiLeaks as sensational as the Abu Ghraib photos, and, in fact, nothing as shocking as some of the videos that have been up on YouTube since the start of the Iraq occupation, but Assange has made the leaks personal, part of a private war with the U.S. government. He has given the publication of leaks a human face. He has become the center of attention. That's too bad. Because it may be too hot at the center for Assange.

When I first saw the gun camera video Assange published, I was struck by the fact that the gunship was adhering to General Petraeus' regrettable rules of engagement for Baghdad. The rules should have been stricter, but at least they prevented the gunships from finishing off the wounded the way this gunship did.

That kind of video, depicting the actual murder of a wounded insurgent, has been available on YouTube for years, along with countless home videos put up there -- self-published, if you will -- by American soldiers and Marines, and also by insurgents. Most of the insurgent videos seem to have been removed quietly over the years on the grounds that they violate YouTube's terms of service. I say "quietly" because YouTube, a publisher whose significance dwarfs the personal soap opera of Assange and WikiLeaks, has never identified itself as a publisher with an ax to grind. In fact, YouTube doesn't pretend to be a publisher at all. Putatively, they are simply providing a forum for the free exchange of information. Therein, it seems to me, lies YouTube's safety, if not legally -- and I don't pretend to understand the legal issues around the free flow of information -- at least morally. For YouTube does not notice us -- unless we draw attention to one another. They have adopted at least the appearance of ignorance and neutrality. Assange has not.

Assange has, in fact, made quite a big deal out of knowing exactly what he's publishing. He has probably been led down that path by the establishment press who are very high on "responsibility" and insist on things like verifying sources, redacting classified information, and making a determination about whether the public's right to know outweighs the danger of exposing operators and operations. Having consented to work with the establishment in making those judgments, Assange has exposed himself to the moral, if not the legal, responsibility to get it right.

I suspect that is something Julian Assange is poorly equipped to do.

The Duke Keomuka Sleep Hold

2010-12-12T15:17:00.000-05:00

For a long time now, I've been puzzled by the fact that, although I know it's pointless to say much about politics, I can't break the habit of noticing what's going on in the political arena and commenting on it. Maybe I still have a vague hope that something I say will make a difference to somebody. Probably everybody who comments on politics has that hope. I read a profile of Paul Krugman a while back that talked about how he hopes somebody in the White House will read one of his columns and give him a call some day. Well, if they're not noticing Krugman, they're not likely to notice me. I know that, but I still think about politics and write about it now and then. It's just so entertaining.

What politics reminds me of is professional wrestling, the kind I snuck into the City Auditorium in Galveston, Texas, to see when I was growing up, climbing a fire escape and inching along a second-story ledge to find an open window, risking my life to see Ricky Starr, Wild Bull Curry and the great Duke Keomuka. The war hadn't been over all that long, and, publicly, we hated the Duke and his Japanese sleep hold, while, privately, we admired and emulated him, putting each other to sleep by cutting off the flow of blood to our teenage brains. We snuck in to see the Duke when he was in town, and, when he wasn't, we crowded into Gilbert Salinas' living room and watched the Duke on an RCA black-and-white TV. Gilbert's father was a longshoreman and they had the first television set in the East End.

I don't know when it was that politics began to remind me of professional wrestling. Probably some time after Lyndon Johnson gave up the presidency and Bobby was assassinated. Certainly, it was before Ronald Reagan was elected. Since then, almost every successful politician has reminded me of a wrestling superstar, and every campaign and political drama has reminded me of professional wrestling match. Duke Keomuka wins the first fall in the Keomuka-Starr match, stunning Starr with a head butt before putting him to sleep, but Starr takes the second fall. In the final fall, Keomuka tries another head butt, Starr steps aside, and Keomuka crashes into the ring post.

That's professional wrestling. And, more and more it seems, that's American politics.

The hardest kind of sleep hold to get out of.

Are We There Yet?

2010-11-28T16:22:00.001-05:00

What are those ants up there in the header doing? I never get tired of looking at them.

When I was making art, I was fascinated by metonymy, a figure of speech that substitutes one word for another word that it's closely associated with. Over time, the crown comes to stand for the king.

It is metonymy that gives documentary film and other forms of sympathetic magic their power over us. And it is metonymy that connects the unseen and unseeable theoretical concepts of science to their manifestations in the realm of the senses.

In the physical world, films and photographs are instantly metonymic. The weaver ants in the header stand for actual ants in a completely realistic and convincing way. The ants in the header may be suspended in time and space, immutable, undying, but, to our minds, they are real. And they are doing a real ant thing, a thing they were caught in the act of doing by the biologist who snapped their picture and generously gave us permission to use it here. They will continue to do that one ant thing and nothing else as long as the photograph lasts. They will not sting us to move us off their trail, they will not turn around and head in the opposite direction, and the major worker will not put the minor worker down. They will move forward together, always tending toward some place outside the frame of the photograph, but never getting there.

Now the scientist who took the picture of these weaver ants, Bert Hölldobler, knows as much about ants as anyone alive, and he tells us that what is literally going on in that picture is an example of the division of labor. What Professor Hölldobler's photograph shows is a major worker carrying a minor worker "to a place where the minor worker is needed for special work, such as attending honeydew-secreting homoopterans or nursing small larvae."

That's the observable fact of the picture. The denotative meaning of it. But we do not live by metonymy alone.

Beyond metonymy, there is metaphor, a figure of speech in which a word that literally denotes one thing or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness. As metaphor, the picture of our ants points to something beyond itself. It refers to other things that it is like. And, as a picture that is a metaphor for something else, the more things it refers to, the better it is.

As metaphor, Professor Hölldobler's weaver ants are amazingly polyreferential.

Willie Nelson Busted

2010-11-27T12:09:00.004-05:00

Willie Nelson has been arrested for possession of marijuana. Seems like a good example of the stupidity of our drug laws to me. Here's a clip of Willie and friends, probably stoned. He's a dangerous man if there ever was one. What a brilliant piece of police work! How in the world did they think of tossing a singer's tour bus for dope?

Outside The Echo Chamber

2010-11-24T12:16:00.004-05:00

Thanksgiving is a good time to reflect on who we are, where we came from and where we're going.

Adam Goodheart has a Homer Winslow cartoon up in the New York Times opinion pages today, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The cartoon was published in Harper's Weekly in 1860.

Winslow Homer, Thanksgiving Day, 1860, The Two Great Classes of Society, from Harper’s Weekly, December 1, 1860

I was struck by Goodheart's observation that "there is precious little celebration in Homer’s tribute to the national holiday, let alone flattery of well-heeled Harper’s readers."

Contrast that with Ted Koppel's Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news at the Washington Post. Koppel, commenting on the echo chamber phenomenon so familiar to anyone who spends time in the blogosphere, notices that "we live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable."

This analysis and commentary drowns television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases. Commentators like Olbermann and O'Reilly "show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone."

Ironically, the Koppel piece at the Post is so cluttered with and buried by on-line ads and scripts, including an ad aimed at investors with at least a $500,000 portfolio, that it's practically unreadable. If it didn't confirm my own biases, I wouldn't mention it.

Kicking The Torture Syndrome

2010-11-23T17:16:00.007-05:00

After years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, examining the conditions of Pfc. Bradley Manning's confinement at Quantico, Va., could be the first step in a process of national reconciliation. President Obama could begin that process now, with a simple act of compassion. He could direct the Department of Defense to find a better way to safeguard Private Manning while he awaits trial. The President will not be able to risk lifting the Prevention of Injury (POI) watch Private Manning is being subjected to, but he can and should make the POI watch more humane.

Sooner or later, Americans do find ways to reconcile their differences. For me, reconciliation after the Vietnam War came with the dedication of Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a sad, retiring monument to the fallen of a sad war. I've always felt the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a more fitting conclusion to the Vietnam War experience than America's victory in the Gulf War, a victory that, according to George H. W. Bush, "kicked the Vietnam syndrome" and, it turns out, restored the confidence America needed to undertake further adventures -- adventures Private Manning is accused of trying to thwart by stealing classified documents.

In the case of Private Manning, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind to a close, Americans have a chance to start reconciling our differences over at least one aspect of the conduct of those wars: our treatment of prisoners of war and captive "enemies" of all kinds.

We have a chance to kick the torture syndrome.

The Department of Defense's treatment of Private Manning has been opposed by the left for a long time -- especially by Glenn Greenwald and by bloggers at Jane Hamsher's Firedoglake -- but now Private Manning's physical and mental health, and the conditions under which he is being held at Quantico, have begun to concern more Americans. It has become clear that, whatever the reasons, those conditions include sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and intentional humiliation. They are conditions that have been denounced as "stupid" by the Department of State's top spokesman, P.J. Crowley, at the cost of his job.

There is something disturbing about seeing the force of the United States government directed against a single individual, in this case a 23-year-old soldier.

Understandably, the Obama administraton is angry at Private Manning. They believe he leaked embarrassing details about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and about State Department operations around the globe. Just as understandably, they would like him to implicate WikiLeaks -- the site that first published the documents they claim Private Manning stole -- in the theft of the documents. But does that anger and that desire to get at the publishers of the documents justify treating Private Manning in a way that many are beginning to describe as torture?

Facts about Private Manning's life at the brig are hard to come by. It's not clear if Private Manning is still being interrogated, or if he's just waiting for his trial. The military insists that Private Manning is being treated the same as any prisoner in his circumstances would be -- whatever that means -- and President Obama is content to take their word for it. But Private Manning and his lawyer dispute that claim. They say Private Manning is being abused and punished under the guise of protecting him.

Most of the information we have about Private Manning's confinement comes from him and his lawyer, David Coombs, and, to be fair, there are contradictions in their story. On the one hand, Mr. Coombs says Private Manning sleeps naked in a cold cell; on the other hand he says the brig has given Private Manning a blanket he can't tear. And Private Manning admits that, out of frustration with his living conditions, he has become upset, yelled and pulled his hair.

To be even more fair, the military has responded -- in a way -- to criticism from Private Manning's supporters. When Private Manning complained about having to sleep naked and stand inspection every morning in the nude, the brig gave him a rough garment to wear. (But then the Marine guards proceeded to mock and humiliate him by calling the garment a "smock.")

This much is clear. Private Manning has been held in solitary confinement since he arrived at the Quantico brig on July 29, 2010.

For 23 hours a day, Private Manning sits in his cell. The guards check on him every five minutes by asking him if he is "okay." He is required to respond. At night, if the guards can't see him clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or he is curled up, facing the wall, they wake him to make sure he is unharmed, forcing him to choose between sleeping without covers or not sleeping at all. He eats all of his meals in his cell. He is not allowed to exercise in his cell, and he only gets one hour of exercise in a closed room outside of his cell each day.

Considering the torture and abuse of prisoners by the U.S military at Abu Ghraib -- where the guards assisted interrogaters by softening the prisoners up -- it's not unreasonable for people concerned with civil liberties to demand an objective review of the way Private Manning is being treated. And it makes sense to wonder why the military is stonewalling attempts by members of Congress to get access to the brig.

On the other hand, it was the U.S. Military itself that uncovered and publicized the crimes at Abu Ghraib. And no one would dispute that it's reasonable for the military and the Obama administration to make Private Manning's safety during his pre-trial confinement a top priority.

Private Manning, his lawyer, and his supporters all want the military to lift the POI watch Private Bradley is living under. His lawyer cites brig psychiatrists who say there is no mental health reason for keeping Private Bradley under POI. But is such a demand realistic?

Preventing injury to Private Manning is a political issue. Simply put, the President can't afford to take the chance -- no matter how remote -- that Private Manning might come to harm.

There is plenty of reason to believe that someone might try to hurt Private Manning if they got the chance. And, while there may be no good reason to believe he would harm himself, his suicide, if it did happen, would deal a devastating blow to the reputation of the military and the Obama administration. It would undoubtedly lead to investigations, conspiracy theories, and attacks on the administration from all sides.

Political suicides are rare, but there have been enough of them to give President Obama pause. The suicides of the monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon and the Quaker Norman Morrison outside the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., for example, had a profound impact on the Vietnam War.

The risk of an individual throwing his body into a war machine to gum up its works may be something psychiatrists are less qualified to assess than politicians are. The Obama administration has no desire to see the young soldier who embarrassed them by showing that they couldn't protect their secrets embarrass them further by killing himself while in their custody. Forget about lifting that POI watch.

But let's make sure the watch is as humane as it can be.

There is no reason why the conditions of Private Manning's POI watch can't be modified to eliminate sleep deprivation and humiliation. And certainly his jailers can find a safe way to relieve the isolation of Private Manning's solitary confinement, including letting him exercise in his cell and get some sunlight and fresh air.

The brig needs to deliver Private Manning for trial unharmed physically -- and unharmed mentally as well. There is no justification for destroying Private Manning in the course of protecting him. If the idea is to prevent Private Manning from harming himself, shouldn't the military consider the fact that loss, hopelessness and isolation are all on the CDC's list of risk factors for suicide?

If he is convicted, Private Manning, whose motive for taking on the United States government may have been to stop killing and torture, will probably end up in Leavenworth, where, in further irony, he will join William Calley, Hasan Akbar and Charles Graner, a guard convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Maximum security prisons like Leavenworth subject some dangerous prisoners -- those who have attacked other prisoners or guards, for example -- to solitary confinement with the goal of conditioning them so that they can be returned to the general population. Private Manning, who no one has suggested is a danger to anyone else, will have done that much time in solitary before he ever comes to trial.

All of us, from the left and from the right as well, should demand that President Obama act now. He should direct the military to immediately cooperate with the Congress. He should direct the Department of Defense to devise humane ways to prevent injury to Private Manning while he awaits trial. If the Department of Defense can't do that, he should get them the advice of experts who can.

Wouldn't America be better off if the debate about Private Manning's pre-trial confinement could be shifted from whether he is being tortured to whether the treatment he is getting is a little too kind? Is there a society on earth that doesn't admire empathy, compassion and mercy?

No matter what we believe about America's role in the world, no matter what we believe about America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no matter how much or how little damage we believe Private Manning may have done, if we cannot reconcile our differences over something as simple as the pre-trial treatment of Private Manning, a young man whose life is effectively over, we may not be able to reconcile our differences at all.

Fundamental Notions Of The Hive

2010-11-12T09:21:00.003-05:00

The quality of our lives matters.

We don't have the political clout to change economic policy in our favor. We have to adapt to economic conditions that will favor the rich for a long time. If we can't become wealthy ourselves, we have to learn to think like the wealthy think, to anticipate their moves. Debt is not a good thing to have.

Find a cheap, warm place to live. Stay close to clean water.

Cooperate. Contribute. Serve. Hold fast. Don't fall through the cracks.

A Tale Of Two Cities

2010-11-09T09:01:00.002-05:00

What are we reading inside the city this morning?

Outside the city, they're not reading anything, unless it's the want ads. But, inside the city, the survivors are reading the New York Times and other forums that, in the pursuit of "balance," have begun to present a tale of two cities.

It was only a matter of time before the recent shift to the right by independent voters fueled feelings of optimism on the part of conservatives like David Brooks and plunged liberals like Bob Herbert even deeper into despair.

So, this morning, Brooks is extolling the promise of America, The Crossroads Nation, while Herbert laments the stupidity and failure of America's political leadership as they pursue The Impossible Dream.

The U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation, Brooks says. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

The nation with the thickest and most expansive networks will define the age. There’s no reason to be pessimistic about that.

On the other hand, Herbert finds plenty to be pessimistic about.

The U.S. is in sad shape, Herbert writes, and most of the policy prescriptions being tossed around by the movers and shakers are bad ones.

To get a sense of how deeply entrenched the problems are, consider what passes for good news these days. The economy added 151,000 jobs last month, which was more than most economists had expected. But even at that rate of job growth, it would take 15 to 20 years to get the employment rate back to where it was when the Great Recession began in December 2007.

Great sacrifices will have to be made if the U.S. is to get its act together, and those sacrifices will have to be shared. We can start now, or we can wait and continue to fantasize about an eventual triumph in Afghanistan, or about cutting budgets with some magic cleaver until they’re finally balanced and all’s right with the world, or whatever other impossible dream is floated by the chronically dissembling political class to blind us to the real world.

How is this supposed to work? What level of thought or action are articles like these supposed to provoke? And whom are they supposed to fire up?

I was struck by a passing comment in a New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman a while back. Krugman, it seems, lives for the moment when Barack Obama will read one of his columns and give him a call.

How absurd.

Picking Up The Pieces

2010-11-07T12:45:00.002-05:00

The Hive is a mess. Tunnels caved in, major flooding in the basement, manuscripts in the basement torn and water-logged. Conversations lost. We fell apart.

I kept thinking, if we stayed with it long enough, we could improvise our way to something important, some clear statement of what it is to be human. Some reader, years from now, might find that theme in our notes. People were here. They had jobs. They had lovers. Husbands and wives. Some of them had kids. Their world was changing fast. Sometimes, it seemed to be coming down around their ears. But they went to movies, danced, listened to music, watched TV, made it to the grocery store. They read books. They talked about the things they saw and heard. Like you, Reader. They tried to be direct, unmediated and genuinely human in what they thought and said, to keep things and people in perspective. They hung out. And they all had porn star names. But the women didn't like to give head.

Maybe that's why the Hive collapsed. Or maybe it was politics. It's easy to have an opinion about politics, but it's mainly a waste of time. Or maybe there is something about creative people that makes collaboration difficult for them, even impossible. Whatever the reason, the Hive collapsed, the victim of some kind of colony collapse disorder. We hardly understood what was happening to us.

When I drained the basement, I found ideas flopping around like fish out of water, and not a single one of them was of any use in finding a way to live better or even to survive in this upside-down, inside-out world of America circa 2010. Not one article or idea as useful as the articles in The Whole Earth Catalog of the Sixties.

What we needed badly a couple of years ago were tools for survival. Do we need them still? I'm not sure we do.

Maybe what we need now are better ways to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we survived the social upheaval that destroyed millions of other lives. Maybe we need to turn our thoughts inward and celebrate the personal life in this time of collective discontent, to adopt the attitude that someone has to keep living, as though we have been selected for that task.

Annals Of The Waterboard (An Opera) February 13, 2010

2010-11-04T15:13:00.002-04:00

2:00 AM. Bush meets Cheney in the hallway of a cell block. Bush is carrying a surfboard. Marine guards snap to attention as Bush approaches.

Cheney: What the hell is that?

Bush: My surfboard.

Cheney: What an asshole. I said we were waterboarding tonight.

Bush: Whoa! You can't call POTUS an asshole. (To the Marines in the hall.) Grab hold of him. (Bush throws the surfboard on the floor.) Hold him down on that!

Cheney: Goddam it, George, stop fucking around.

Bush: Somebody get me some water and a rag.

Tutti cantano insieme:

The Marines: Sir! Aye, Aye! Sir!

Cheney: Don't board me, George!

Bush: Tube City! Damn! Turn him over now!

Sacrifice I The Sugar

2010-11-04T11:57:00.000-04:00

Gabriel

2010-11-04T11:55:00.002-04:00

Sacrifice I Burning

2010-11-04T11:53:00.000-04:00

Maundy Thursday Circa 1975

2010-11-04T11:51:00.004-04:00

A scene from Michael Crossed Out.

This simple allegory was revealed to me in a dream while I was documenting the performance art of Michael Tracy, whose intention it was to make visible the vestiges of ancient signs and symbols in the modern world.

The Archangel Michael has fallen from grace. Obsessed with the natural world, he has forgotten his place. On Good Friday, he has himself entombed by friends and disciples. On Easter Sunday, he rises from the dead. Later that night, the blasphemer renounces the world, but he is brutally murdered by the Archangel Gabriel.

Good Friday Circa 1975

2010-11-04T11:48:00.003-04:00

Easter Sunday Circa 1975

2010-11-04T11:44:00.001-04:00

Le Monde Circa 1975

2010-11-04T11:41:00.001-04:00

Michael (Crossed Out)

2010-11-04T11:37:00.000-04:00

The Great Depression January 25, 2009

2010-11-04T11:34:00.000-04:00

I was born in a Texas Gulf Coast town during the Depression, right before the war. My grandmother was Italian and my grandfather was an Irish cop. My father was a bohunk from Pennsylvania who was in the Army when he met my mother. He got out of the Army, cut grass and delivered ice until my grandfather got him a job on the force. He went back into the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up occupying Japan. My mother had a half-brother, my uncle Bill, who was in the Army Air Corps when the war started. He was the toughest man I ever knew.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents in their house down by the docks. During the Depression, my mother says, my grandfather used to bring home groceries and meat he got from the grocers and butchers on his beat. We'd share the food with my grandmother's sisters and brothers and their families sometimes. My mother emptied bed pans at the hospital down the street until she got a job with the Corps of Engineers.

I don't remember any of that. I remember card games in the dining room, listening to people talking and laughing while I fell asleep, a paper jack-o-lantern that caught fire, and falling off the back porch. Later, I remember the lights were off at night along the beach because of the German submarines in the Gulf. When my dad came home from Japan, he brought me a sword.

Japan 1945

2010-11-04T11:31:00.000-04:00

The Wolf Of Winter

2010-11-04T11:24:00.001-04:00

A long time ago, I told my son, I think he was in the first grade at the time, that Kenneth Patchen's The Wolf Of Winter was about the winter cold killing poor people. I doubt we got into nice distinctions between body and spirit or into the idea that there is a pessimism born of winter that afflicts boys who grow up in the South. A winter depression that settles into your bones and makes it hard to move.

Economic hard times are bound to hit people in the North, in the big frozen cities, harder than they hit people in the South. Finding a way to stay warm, a place to sleep, has to be tough. In Seattle, they open up the public buildings at night and the homeless sleep in the halls. For the poor, winter is hard. During a depression, it's going to be deadly.

The first panhandler of the winter turned up on our street yesterday. It was recycling day, and, in retrospect, I imagine she was working the snow-covered sidewalk for bottles and saw me dragging my little green tub of bottles and cans to the curb.

Her story was one I'd heard before. Just moved into the neighborhood. Family in trouble somewhere. Gas money to get to them. Pay me back in a couple of days. God bless me. Can she give me a hug? We settle for shaking hands.

I've never turned a panhandler down. It's a deep superstition of some kind. The way I buy off the bad luck that stalks me, just out of sight. Like a wolf.

The Girl 2008

2010-11-04T11:20:00.003-04:00

Sacrifice I June 21, 2008

2010-11-04T11:18:00.002-04:00

Michael Out Of Egypt June 21, 2008

2010-11-04T11:07:00.002-04:00

Zyema's Garden June 3, 2007

2010-11-04T11:04:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day May 28, 2007

2010-11-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Vietnam Is Where I Found My Family
By Ann Bryan Mariano

"Sometimes an officer would say, 'What the hell is a woman doing here?' and I'd shrug nonchalantly. 'My editor sent me to cover the fighting.' There were struggles with the military over where I could and couldn't go, and what I could and couldn't do. I tried never to back down and usually my dogged persistence prevailed.

"Soldiers offered me pistols or knives, believing that I should have some kind of weapon. Even though I was from Texas, guns made me uncomfortable. I was given a snub-nosed .38 pistol as a farewell gift from an officer in the 1st Cavalry who was returning home to the States. He was sure I'd need to shoot my way out of a Vietcong ambush one day, but of course I never did. I was afraid if I had to shoot anything it would be my own foot.

"I was opposed to the war when I arrived in Vietnam and left as a true pacifist, more convinced than ever that humanity had to find peaceful ways of resolving conflict. Being in the field proved to me that while there are many cases of individual courage and heroism among soldiers, there is nothing about war itself that is heroic. The suffering and deaths of soldiers and casualties among the Vietnamese civilian population were staggering. I had no doubt that America's involvement was tragic and doomed to fail. There was nothing to prepare me for the death and devastation I saw."

Ann Bryan Mariano was in Vietnam from 1966 to 1971, reporting for The Overseas Weekly, a privately-owned newspaper for military stationed overseas. According to Women's eNews, she is currently suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and wrote her essay with the help of friends and family. "Alzheimer’s disease blows through my memory like wind through a Buddhist sand painting. Vietnam is still the most beautiful country I have ever seen. But images once so fixed in my mind are now dancing ghosts."

I knew Ann in Frankfurt at the time she left for Vietnam. I remember she took along a little red cocktail dress and a pair of red heels as a matter of principle, and it pissed off the male reporters at the Overseas Weekly that she was the first Overseas Weekly reporter into Vietnam. Even so, the reports she filed from Vietnam were read with grudging respect. I don't know why I thought of the Overseas Weekly today, and, finding a slim archive on line, noticed Ann's name in the masthead and googled my way to her story. I can't really imagine what Alzheimer's disease is like, but I hope Ann still catches glimpses of herself in Frankfurt the way I remember her. She was a good friend who put up with my arrogance and refused to believe I wasn't a serious newsman long after that was clear to everyone else. She taught me the phrase: "I can't even stand the way he ties his shoes," nursed me through pneumonia and sold me her Borgward when she left for Vietnam. I had a letter and a scarab she sent from India, and another letter from Vietnam, but I lost them, and I never heard from her again.

Any And Some May 8, 2007

2010-11-04T10:49:00.000-04:00

I began reading Whitehead's An Introduction To Mathematics to K tonight, and was struck by Whitehead's description of personal sensations. "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." I was trying to remember who said we're condemned to a life of solitary confinement inside our own skin. And I was wishing you could feel what I feel when you touch me; that I could feel what you feel when I touch you. That you could hear your voice the way I hear it; feel my longing when you're gone. And then I read: "Mathematics as a science commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specification of definite particular things," and K, almost asleep by then, mumbled: "That's very interesting."

Red Devil In A White City April 25, 2007

2010-11-04T10:34:00.001-04:00

D and P came by last night to record Kate, singing Everything's Different. They're going to do an arrangement, then record her again. I made chicken soup and some guacamole. Tequilla, beer, wine. D, P and S finished a project yesterday, and the mood was gay. Kate has added a bridge to the lyrics: "I don't care if you're a red devil in a white city or a blue angel in a white cloud ..." For the first time I see where one of her images comes from. We were reading Devil In The White City last year, and she probably heard us talking about it. What a concrete image.

Remembering Capa April 18, 2007

2010-11-04T10:31:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about Capa today. Reaction across the web to the cell phone video of police outside the building where the Viginia Tech massacre took place made me think about Capa. Then about Germany in 1965, and the way I decided to lay around Frankfurt, getting high and making love, instead of going to Vietnam as a stringer for the Houston Post, even after A went there. And about how R tried to talk me into going to Nicaragua with him when his marriage was on the rocks. But I had just met S, so I stayed in Austin.

Excellence April 17, 2007

2010-11-04T10:23:00.000-04:00

Why is it that anything excellent can bring tears to my eyes? I believe I am becoming more nostalgic every day. Everything reminds me of something or someone I miss.

Echocardiogram April 12, 2007

2010-11-04T10:15:00.001-04:00

When you see the ultrasound image of your daughter's heart, steadily beating on the monitor next to her bed, you know what it is right off. This is the same heart you saw and heard beating on an ultrasound monitor at NYU eight years ago, just before she was born. Her heart beats slower now, and you can see it in great detail. You see the chambers, the valves opening and closing, the blood gushing in and out of her heart as she lies quietly, watching Stuart Little on a television screen across the room. Her heart beats steadily on and on, while yours races and pounds every time the technician zooms in on a valve or marks something on that picture of the sweetest heart in the world.

My Last Hope April 9, 2007

2010-11-04T09:52:00.000-04:00

My daughter may restore my faith in women.

Everything's Different March 21, 2007

2010-11-04T09:49:00.002-04:00

Everything's different,
Not the same.
Can't find me in the hall of fame.
Look into the face of fame.
Look into the face of God.
But most importantly, most importantly,
Look into the face of you.
'Cause, honey, you're the most
Important thing to me.
Everything's different,
Not the same.
Can't find me in the hall of fame.
Woo.

Kate Glad 2006

Friends March 20, 2007

2010-11-04T09:47:00.001-04:00

Dropped my cell phone in the snow at A's as I was getting in or out of my truck in his driveway. I didn't realize I'd lost the phone for a couple of days, and it took me a couple of days more to figure out where I'd lost it. By the time I got over there to poke around in the snow for it, A had cleared his driveway with a snow blower. After the snow melted, he found my mangled phone up on the lawn where the snow blower had thrown it.

MT had a friend like that. John lived across the hall from MT on the Strand in Galveston before it was gentrified. MT brought a couple of guys back to his loft one night and they tried to kill him. They had MT up on the top of his refrigerator, trying to hold them off with a paring knife, when John busted down MT's door and beat the shit out of them with a baseball bat. Thing is, the door wasn't locked.

Sometimes relationships are like that. Wires get crossed somehow. Takes a while to figure that out. You have to watch your ass.

Climbing Down June 7, 2006

2010-11-04T09:43:00.002-04:00

I had the strangest dream about me and S last night. We were in Washington, D.C., walking down a dark alley, and we came to a place in the alley where the pavement fell off into a deep ravine. There was a tree in the ravine, and its top was level with the alley. S and I stepped into the treetop and climbed down the tree. At first I thought she wouldn't be able to make the climb down. It was too steep and slippery. But every time I thought we were stuck, we found another foothold, another branch or another knot on the wet trunk.

Breathing Under Water May 22, 2006

2010-11-04T09:39:00.003-04:00

I dreamed I could breathe water. I dreamed I was in a pool, swimming with K and S, and I could breathe the water into my lungs and stay under water as long as I wanted to. I could feel the water going into my lungs. I had to breathe in very hard to get it to go down. It caught at first, as though something were covering my airway and keeping the water out. But when I breathed in as hard as I could, the water went down and I was all right. It was a powerful feeling.

She Got One! May 25, 2005

2010-11-04T09:36:00.000-04:00

Princess Zyema got her first mouse last night. I found it on the porch. She had chewed it until it looked like a black turd, lying next to a small pile of purple and black guts.

Hello Kitty Admires The Baby Jesus March 8, 2005

2010-11-04T09:18:00.003-04:00

My daughter hasn't quite got the hang of religion yet. She wanted a nativity scene, and we got her one from Saint Vincent DePaul. She called it her Jesus set, and mixed in Hello Kitty and farm and jungle animals. I figure the Mary I grew up with wouldn't mind that much.

Jasmine March 14, 2005

2010-11-04T09:16:00.000-04:00

My Night Blooming Jasmine has started to bloom already. I have two big plants in pots in my sun room. I bring them inside in the Fall and put them back out on the porch in the Summer. They've never bloomed this early before. It's amazing to sit in my sun room in the evening, look out at the moonlit snow and smell Jasmine. I just have one little cluster of about 10 flowers on one plant, which is lucky, since my wife hates the smell. But I grew up with it. One whiff transports me back to warm Summer nights in Galveston, Texas, reminds me of the warm waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, brings back the heavy scent of the perfume on the necks of the Mexican girls I held in the back seat of my old man's Pontiac. I worry about what kinds of smells my young daughter is going to remember from her childhood, growing up in Wisconsin. Wood fires maybe. Other Winter smells. But Jasmine, too, come to think of it. She loves it. She tears off one flower every night and takes it to her room.

Deformed Monarch Butterfly March 9, 2005

2010-11-04T09:13:00.000-04:00

Past Tense March 5, 2005

2010-11-04T09:10:00.000-04:00

That afternoon, he was looking at a Polaroid picture of his wife and him that he took twenty years before, and he found himself trying to remember who the people in the picture were. They had been standing in front of a bathroom mirror. He had been behind her, with the camera in his right hand. In the mirror, it appeared to be in his left hand. He had reached around her with his other hand to touch her stomach, just below her breast. She had tilted her head back a little and smiled. He missed that woman. He wondered if she missed him.

Resignation February 23, 2005

2010-11-04T09:07:00.001-04:00

He was sixty-five when he realized he would never be happy again.

Princess Zyema January 3, 2005

2010-11-04T09:02:00.000-04:00

Princes Zyema Velvet Kitten sits on my lap, purring, and kneads my stomach, while I consider this post. She slips behind me on the chair, rubbing her face against my back. This is my daughter's cat, rescued from the Humane Society. She's too young to hunt anything except her little, rabbit-fur mice. She leaps into the air, back arched, tail curved, and comes down on them with all four feet. For some reason, she likes to drop them in her water bowl. There are no mice in the garden now. Everything is under 6 inches of snow. Do mice hibernate? I picture them in their little burrows, sitting in rocking chairs, knitting, sipping tea or smoking pipes. They have no idea what awful deaths await them in the Spring.

That Place Between A Woman's Legs

2010-11-03T22:14:00.006-04:00

What do you call that arch between a woman's legs? Why do some women have it and others don't?

Mary J. Blige has it.

Lingerie mannequins have it.

Megan Fox has it.

Megan Fox for Emporio Armani by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

But not Norma Jean.

Is it called the pubic arch, or does it have another name, something more poetic? And what about adjectives? Wide? Flat? I like the way it looks, but I don't know what it's called.

I tried to write about filming a singer with the light shining through that space between her thighs, and I couldn't think of the name of that arch.

Coney Islands

2010-06-27T15:21:00.005-04:00

One of the greatest disappointments of my life was the first time I ate a chili cheese dog at Nathan's on Coney Island.

I expected the archtype of the Coney Islands I ate at Keith's Drive-in on Seawall Boulevard in Galveston, Texas, when I was a kid. I had my mouth set for a hot dog with mustard, relish and onions, covered with chili and topped by a thick layer of melted American cheese. Instead, I got a chili dog with processed cheese squirted on the top.

Here's how you make the real thing.

Use whatever kind of buns, hot dogs and chili you like best. (My wife has even used smart dogs and vegetarian chili on whole wheat buns, but I don't vouch for that.) What I do vouch for is all beef hot dogs, regular hot dog buns, American cheese and this fast chili recipe.

Chili

2 Tbsp Peanut Oil

2-3 cloves of garlic

1 small onion

1 pound of ground beef

3 0z bottle of Gephardt's chili powder

Salt and pepper

2 8 oz cans of Hunts tomato sauce

Mince the garlic and chop the onion

Heat the oil in a thick-bottomed pot and saute the garlic and onion

Add the ground beef and brown it

Add salt and pepper and 1/2 to 3/4 of the bottle of chili powder (If you need to add more chili powder later, take some of the chili from the pot, mix in the chili powder, then dump the mix back in. Don't just shake dry chili powder into the chili.)

Add the tomato sauce and 2 cans of water

Cook at a low boil for 30 minutes or more.

Coney Islands

Preheat the oven to between 250 and 325 degrees.

Heat the chili.

Put some hot dog buns in a baking dish.

Heat the hot dogs in boiling water for a couple of minutes then stick them in the buns. (If you have young kids, slice the hot dogs about 3/4 of the way through lengthwise.)

Add mustard, relish, onions and chili in that order. (My daughter adds ketchup, too, but I don't vouch for that, either. You do what you want.) At this point you have a pretty good chili dog.

Cover each chili dog with a couple of strips of American cheese. Absolutely no substitutions. I use 1 slice, broken in half, for each Coney Island. Sometimes I use 2 slices, but I think that makes the cheese too thick.

Bake in the middle of the oven until the cheese is completely melted and the buns are toasty.

I like to cut my Coney Islands in half before I eat them.

What?

Beer is good with Coney Islands, but, for my money, milk is actually better.

Father's Day

2010-06-25T19:45:00.002-04:00

When my father got out of the Army, he cut grass and delivered ice until my grandfather got him a job on the police force. My mother divorced him right after that. He went back into the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up fighting in the Philippines and occupying Japan.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents in a house down by the docks during the war. My mother emptied bed pans at the hospital down the street until she got a job with the Corps of Engineers.

I remember card games in the dining room, listening to people talking and laughing while I fell asleep, a paper jack-o-lantern that caught fire, and falling off the back porch. Later, I remember the lights were off at night along the beach because of the German submarines in the Gulf.

My father sent me a little vinyl record from the Philippines. A scratchy and tinny sounding recording, reminding me to be a good boy.

When he came home from Japan, he brought me a sword.

He lost most of one lung to a fungus he contracted in the Philippines. The army didn't know how to cure the fungus, so they just cut the infected part of his lung out. The surgery essentially ended his real life. He lived the next 50 years as an invalid, then died from cancer at the age of 85.

He died in the winter. He was in a hospice in Mississippi, where he had a warm room with big windows and four women to change his pajamas and his sheets every night, laughing and singing while they put the old man to bed.

When he lapsed into a coma, we drove over from Houston, and he was still alive, but breathing in a labored way that lifted his shoulders off the bed with every wheezing breath.

We sat with him for nine or ten hours, talking to him and wetting his lips with a piece of gauze, soaked in cold water.

I was holding his hand when he suddenly opened his eyes and squeezed my hand, and I said hey, he's awake, then no, he's gone as he died. And I felt that something had just left that body. Took one last look and moved on, leaving me next in line.

For an entire year after that, I had a recurring dream. I dreamed I was being roasted slowly, like a pig in a pit. The strange thing about the dream was it really hurt. I could feel the intense heat from the coals, charring my skin. It took a year for the fire to burn my skin away and prepare me to carry on in my father's place.

And he was a very ordinary man.

The End Is Near

2010-06-25T19:30:00.001-04:00

Or maybe it's a couple of years away.
Today's the day the physicists at the Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border got up to speed. Or at least the protons whizzing around the collider, some to the left, some to the right, got up to speed.
Protons are beginning to collide at speeds that produce enough energy to be interesting to physicists who hope to create and observe some natural events they haven't been able to observe before. Like the creation of black holes.
Most news sources report on the possibility of black holes at Hadron with a reassuring blurb. Something like the AP's:
"The experiments will come over the objections of some people who fear they could eventually imperil Earth by creating micro black holes — subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
"CERN and many scientists dismiss any threat to Earth or people on it, saying that any such holes would be so weak that they would vanish almost instantly without causing any damage."
Apparently, scientists are so convinced the black holes won't get out of hand that they have absolutely no plans to deal with that contingency.
How long would we have, anyway? If a black hole at Hadron grew, how long would it take for Michigan, say, to disappear? Would I even know the black hole had happened? Or would I simply disappear in mid-something or other. One moment I'm here, and then I'm gone.
I remember reading about some fission experiments that led up to the atomic bomb. In one of the early ones, physicists constructed a guillotine device and took some plutonium, about the size of a critical mass, and divided it into three parts. What they did was rig the guillotine so the middle part of the mass fell down between the other two parts, creating close to a critical mass for a fraction of a second, while the middle piece slid through. Then they took the contraption down into a mine somewhere in New Mexico, turned on a gieger counter to measure the radiation emitted, dropped the guillotine, and fried themselves.
And I vaguely recall that physicists kept buckets of cobalt solution around to throw on a nuclear pile under Chicago's Soldiers field if the chain reaction got out of hand.
Sounds funny now, but the physicists at Hadron don't seem to be even that well prepared.

It strikes me that it takes a peculiar kind of individual to poke a hole in the universe.

Laocoön

2010-06-25T19:27:00.000-04:00

I think I'll hang out with the Greeks today. Take a break from the modern world. Get back to the primordial struggle of man against reptile at about the time we were seeing some possibility of mastering the natural world.

How did we end up where we are? If all that counts is the ineffable quality of each moment, what compulsion turns us away from the moment? What terrible force set the modern world in motion? Wasn't I supposed to live my life all at once, take one deep breath and die?

Thetis knew Laocoön. She saw him die a couple of days after Achilles fell in front of Troy. Athena sent the snakes to shut Laocoön up, they say. His mistake was trying to warn the Trojans about that horse. The Trojans thought the snakes killed him for lying and took the horse inside.

Thetis was slandered by Hera, jilted by Zeus, raped by Peleus with a little help from Chiron, and insulted by Paris at her own wedding. She tore Troy apart trying to get to Paris, and she lost her son in the war.

I'd been looking for her for twenty years when I ran into her in London. I knew who she was right off. She didn't remember me at all.